How Dark Can A Night Grow?
by shadow-walker12
Summary: When Aidan goes for his son Henry after the end of S2e8 he is confronted with a situation he didn t imagine before. Goes deep into S2e9. Rated M absolutely/ Adults only for reason as I bring up here some of what the show left out. It s partly ( Chapter 2) some pretty strong stuff to cope with though. So if you think that might become too hard for you, do not go here. Please R
1. Chapter 1 You ve got me under my skin

**Disclaimer;** No copyright infringement intended. All characters belong to Syfy, Muse Entertainmant and the writers. I´m only writing for fun and I´m making no money with it.

**prelude:**_When Aidan goes for his son Henry after the end of S2e8 he is confronted with a situation he didn´t imagine before... _**_Rated M absolutely/ Adults only for reason_**_as I bring up here some of what the show left out. Aidan´s and a bit of Henry´s POV later on. Being myself used to forensic and medical stuff, it´s partly ( Chapter 2) some pretty strong stuff to cope with though. So if you think this might become too hard for you, don´t go here... Mystery. Angst. Henry, Aidan and characters from the show._

**_Chapter 1 _**

_**You´ve got me under my skin**_

Aidan sat in his house, on the sofa, his head sunken on his hands. His breath came in irregular gasps. His thoughts went in circles and he couldn´t concentrate on anything else but the memories of these disturbing sounds that came out of the large room where normally the Family met. These sounds had ward him off the House, had made him flee from the foyer. Disgusted by the stubborn ignorance of two of the leading members, right and left hand of Suren.

They had been sitting there like uninterested and deaf guardians, faces like stone, deaf to the screams and the plea that even broke the heavy doors.

"You...would...bet...ter...kill me..", before the plea broke under a series of screams, so disturbing, so tortured that Aidan had covered his ears with his hands when he fled from the House.

_What have you done? What have you done, Aidan? You have delivered your son, your very blood, to the hands of death! Delivered to the hands of a woman, so vengeful that even death would shrug back. Jealous, hungry for revenge for a crime she herself committed decades ago. Not Henry had killed this mortal woman leading to a massacre she was punished for by sealing her to the ground for nearly a century. Henry couldn´t be blamed for what she had done. He could only be blamed for playing in a league that hadn´t been his._

The memories kept him in their bitter grip, made his heart beating weakly and fast.

_Henry would better be alive when I will come for him!_, he had told to Suren.

But what would that matter to her heart? She even won´t be afraid of him, afraid of his possible revenge if Henry would die. What seemed to be more certain than the other way round. No turning back. He was a nurse at Suffolk Boston Hospital like Josh who wasn´t at home because his shift went up to four p.m. As a nurse he knew pretty well what it meant to get lost of all the skin. He had seen victims of house fires brought to the ER, knew pretty well how low their chances were to survive when the level of burnt skin crossed the border of seventy percent of body surface.

Tears began to run down on Aidan´s cheeks when his thoughts went to the smart face of Henry, his cerulean eyes, the impossible smirk that so often split his face. Henry was so much younger on years than him. His lack of sorrow, his way to live his immortal life. He could not blame him for a lack of responsibility, he simply enjoyed life with all its sides, didn´t restrict his longings and urges. Henry never was very resistant to the way of women, even never missed a chance to take his fill and take a woman.

Henry would better be alive when I will come for him! The threat behind these, his words, did impress Suren even not to the slightest. She had smiled, her finger sliding along the blade of that damned Viking knife like comforting a lover. Aidan has had hints of thoughts that the revenge of a Mongolian princess won´t have been easy to take, but he had no clue to which lengths she would go to satisfy her anger.

Razor sharp blade.

If sharp or not.

Henry would suffer far worse than any sin would deserve. Suffer for something he hadn´t done...

And I have handed him over to this!

I didn´t hinder Suren to commit a crime of a cruelty no being, human or not, would deserve!

Suren should have blamed me for Henry´s mistakes. Because I´m his maker and Henry falls under my responsibility. Not the other way around.

I should have known better! The very moment I went into her conference room with Henry! I should have known better that she had some unspeakable cruelness in mind when I have seen the table covered in plastic foils! Oh my God! I should have taken my son and run away as fast as possible. Even for the price of no return for both of us!

But by now it is too late! What the hell have I done?

Aidan´s thoughts circled round by round when he asked himself for what kind of revenge he would be going for if he would come back to find Henry dead. Kill Suren right away even if it meant his own death which he so much more may deserve than his son. Or to burn her alive at the stake to let her suffer the same way she did to Henry before he would send her soul to hell.

He had killed his own maker. Bishop. And yet he walked the surface of earth unharmed.

He was so caught by his grief that he didn´t hear...but how could he as she was a ghost...when suddenly Sally entered the living room.

She saw him sitting on the large couch, face buried in his hands, blood drops glistening on the tips of his fingers and on the jeans on his thighs.

"Aidan! What´s up, hm? Got you hurt? There´s blood over there...", she directed to his jeans and when Aidan lifted his face she saw that his cheeks were covered with blood drops. His shoulders were shivering with sobs.

When vampires cried they spilt blood tears.

"Aidan! Dear! What´s going on? Can...can I do anything to help you...?", she started carefully, her hand went to his shoulder, felt him shiver under the touch that in this moment went material despite the fact she was a ghost and mostly had problems to handle material things. She could dissolve into fog, disappear faster than any human being´s eyes would be able to follow. But now she felt so material like rarely before since she had died on that damned stairs.

"Can´t help me...", he choked; "...let me be! Go!" Aidan looked at her, his eyes going black, fangs itching to fall. His voice was much more rough than intended, much more raw than Sally deserved. His inner pain which he couldn´t share with anybody in the moment, even not with Sally, made him feel like his inner side turned outside, burning to the surface like the fires of hell.

He couldn´t stand her anymore. Not now and he won´t like to blame her for. It all wasn´t her guilt but his own and so he abruptly jumped up, turned around with vampire speed and ran up the stairs and fled for his room.

The door felt shut with a sound so loud it even hurt Sally´s ghostly ears.

She looked after him, upstairs , long seconds after he had vanished. Then she sat down on the sofa waiting for Aidan to appear again.

Upstairs in the sleeping room Aidan looked around helplessly. His blackened eyes moved across the room; the bed and the closet. The daylight seemed to burn in his eyes despite the fact it could not hurt him. His kind was resistant to the sun other than the monster of Stoker´s novel or the vampires of Hammer or others of all these freaky movies made by humans who so dearly clung to legends.

For half a second a grin went over his face before the shades fell like before.

Should concentrate on what I´ll have to do when I got Henry here!

To get him here! Josh wouldn´t be pleased by this. They never invited other vampires to their house, kept it kind of restricted area since Bishop had killed Rebecca in his former home. Never let anybody of them in again for you can´t be sure they are not going to kill you or your beloved out of nether reasons. Call that instincts.

He was responsible for Sally and for Josh. Josh, his friend and Full Moon time werewolf. But Josh, in his human shape wasn´t strong enough to be a real threat for a vampire who was capable of letting himself go to the animal inside at any time, other than Josh who only turned wolf at Full Moon. Josh, who was suffering enough being forced to cope with it...his friend Josh would break by the fact to be a...monster...at any time.

Not that Henry, a more than severely hurt Henry, would be a threat to Josh. As far as Aidan could think about, Henry wouldn´t be able to move by own strength, the less to attack anybody.

How at least do I get him here?

The distance from the House to his home was not a short one and he could not cover him in a rescue foil, simply throw him over his shoulder and carry him home like a carpet going to be sold by one of the Gipsy living outside the city.

Hire a cap? Hypnotizing the driver to hide the fact that vampire blood would cover all over inside, hiding the fact he would drive a man looking like he jumped out the Boston Forensics Fridge.

Aidan shook his head no and made a decision.

There would be time. He had come home not so long ago and he had left The House directly when the screams started. It would even Suren take time to complete her over all cruel work. He could and did not want to think about how much time she´d need to kill Henry ninety-nine percent. To enjoy how Henry went to live on with one percent left.

Aidan looked into the bathroom mirror, cleaned his face from the bloody tears, put on his sunglasses and took his hoody and his gray jeans jacket and went down the stairs. In the hall which was also the large living room on the first floor he gripped his sports bag and left before an astonished Sally could ask a word.

Aidan ran for the bus that drove him to the hospital. It wasn´t his shift now but he reached the clothing room unharmed. No one ever asked what you were going to do in there when they know you. Maybe you changed shift with a colleague which wasn´t so unusual. Aidan changed into his nurse dress; blue long pants and blue shirt along with his identity tag around the neck. So he could walk around the hospitals floors without rising any suspect. Colleagues knew him and he was a liked one among them because of his experience and calm friendliness.

He strolled along the floor which was busy at this time. Nurses and care assistants were busy with medication, care and assistance to the doctors so no one took notice of Aidan who went to the chamber where bandages, gloves and all materials needed for the patients were stored.

He opened the door, slipped in and stopped for a moment to listen if anybody else was in there between the shelves full of stuff.

He was alone and went through the shelves, grabbed sheets, bed covers, a one time gown and a pair of hospital slippers which were used for patients who came in without any hospital fitting belongings. For sure you can´t walk inside your hospital room and along the floors with naked feet or your street shoes. Especially if you fell victim to an accident or a crime that ruined your clothes.

Analgetics?

He had no access to the real strong stuff without a written order by a doctor. Morphine? He even didn´t know if those of his kind will tolerate it. Never had experience with it. He couldn´t get to and but if he could not risk to test it on Henry.

Aidan took all he could carry without rising any suspect, left the storage room and went down the floor. Nobody asked him where he was going to. So he reached the lift and drove down to the clothing room undetected. With a swift move he opened his closet, put the things into his sports bag and changed clothes again.

Nobody had seen him nor asked him what was going on. In the worst case he would have had to hypnotize a person and tilt the memory that he or she had seen him here.

So he left and went down the street.

He needed something to cover and hide Henry from the very eyes of any person outside the House. Irrespective the way he was going to bring Henry home.

A long second there rose a doubt in his mind if not anything he was preparing would be useless, unnecessary when he will find Henry dead. Angrily he shoved the doubt aside.

Henry would be alive. He had to be! Otherwise he...

Stop! Stop that! He demanded to himself.

Aidan went to a road where he know to be a shop for bicycles and equipment. He entered the shop and searched along the bicycle clothing for a large sized rain cape. Henry wasn´t the tallest one among the vampires he knew and with a height of one seventy eight he would easily fit in the cape he selected. It was widely cut and would fell loose enough together with a large sized hood not to cause more pain than Henry would still be suffering from. The only problem was that all the rain capes were of bright and conspicuous colors designed to heighten the visibility of bicycle riders even in the dark. So he decided for a light blue one. Aidan paid and left, not suspicious with his sports bag.

He looked on his clock.

I should go to the House, he thought.

Whether he was just right in time or he had to wait until Henry was rea... Until Suren was ready, had finished her revenge on his son.

He had told him that there would be a price to be paid for his returning to the Family. But he had no idea what Suren had in mind for her so called forgiveness and acceptance of Henry back to the shelter of the House and the Family.

Aidan stopped in his track, swallowed hard to ring down the knot in his suddenly dry throat and the newly rising tears of guilt. It won´t be possible for him to walk down the street with his face smeared with blood.

Be a nurse! Be the good and strong nurse going for your patient.

That was an image he could hold on tightly to.

He had been in more than one war, had been hurt himself and had seen worse. Had seen comrades dying beside him. Friend and enemy as well.

He had killed.  
Human and those of his own kind when necessary.

He had killed his maker, his vampire _father_. Bishop, whose ghost was to haunt him.

But Henry was none of those nameless.

He was his son! His very blood he made him of when that French soldier went to stake him in the primitive field hospital in 1918 and the stake went right into Henry Durham´s belly instead, when Henry tried to stop him. It had been an accident so to see. An accident that happened when Henry tried to save a hurt soldier from another one who seemed to have gone mad in fever.

He bit down hard, entered the narrow alley between the house of Josh and his next neighbor. Deep in his thoughts he opened the door of his car and started the engine. He drove into the late afternoon traffic and took the way to the House. Cars, humans, biker and trucks went by but he didn´t even waste any notice on them. His vampire skills helped him to manage the traffic without effort. Finally he drove into a parking lot, left the car and took his sports bag from the luggage trunk. He slammed it close.

_To be continued_


	2. Chapter 2 Take with you what is yours

**prelude:** _Being used to medical stuff I thought about how Aidan may have been able to get Henry home after Suren took her pound of flesh from him. Looking at Henry´s condition from a medical point of view there must have been more then simply compelling him or anything like this. So you´ll find some stuff based on treatment a hospital would use. Warning; this chapter contains scenes which are definitely __**not suitable for minors! Adults only!**_

_**Chapter 2**_

_**Take with you what is yours...**_

Aidan was so shed in his thoughts that he reached House without even noticing it, his steps leading himself in his track out of habit. He stopped when he reached the heavy portal that once had been the doors to one of the most luxurious hotels of Boston.

Now it was the House of the Family.

Since a very long time.

And the residence of the respected and indisputable Leader of the Boston Vampire Community.

For now it was Suren to whom Mother had given the power. The power to reign as the authority over all vampires living in Boston. And to destroy those who won´t obey or were orphans, vampires living outside the community and every vampire was free to hunt them down if he wanted so.

Aidan stopped in front of the portal.

He listened to the inside if he would hear a sound. Sounds he really didn´t want to hear. Sounds he shielded his ears from when he had more fled than left the House before.

But there was silence and the only noises came from the traffic outside on the street.

He took his breath, collected his mind, took the heavy bag in the left hand and knocked on the door.

After a moment that seemed to stretch into eternity he heard a voice from inside.

"Who wants to enter?", a strong voice demanded.

"Aidan. I´m coming for my son Henry!"

The door was opened and a man, nearly 6´8" tall stood there. One of the human guardians Suren used for her own protection. These very carefully chosen men were selected because of their total obedience and their absolute loyalty.

"Enter freely. I invite you to the house!" That was the formula to let one in. Aidan didn´t really need her because he had been inside so often. Otherwise Suren would have uninvited him in between.

The man lead a hand to the large foyer and indicated him to place his bag beside a large chair.

"I will need this!", Aidan protested.

"Our honorable leader Suren will decide if you will have need of anything, including your bag!"the answer came. He waved to another man who stood beside a wall and he drew nearer. "Check the bag for weapons!", he demanded.

He raised a hand to stop Aidan during the other guardian went through the bag.

"Nothing but hospital materials and a bike rain cape. Nothing of suspect.", he gave back when he finished his control.

"Could have told you if you asked me...", Aidan spit back.

He was angry and nervous and anxious, not certain what he would find and what was waiting for him.

The guardian went to the large meeting room, knocked respectfully and when no restrict followed, opened the door.  
"Milady, Aidan is waiting for you receiving him." he bowed respectfully.

"Let him in."

The guardian opened the door for Aidan, let him in. Behind him the door was closed again.

Suren stood straight upright in front of the large table like she had been standing there when he and Henry had entered hours before. Her arms were folded in front of her chest, her hands covered with surgical gloves, covered in blood. Her white blouse and her sand-colored short skirt were hidden under a plastic surgical overall, stained from chest to seam with blood.

Aidan stopped for a moment.

An all too intense smell of blood hung in the air like in a slaughter house, filled his nostrils like thick red fog. The white precious chairs were shoved to the far corners of the room so the large table, hidden under double layers of plastic foil normally used when rooms were freshly painted, stood free like a presentation stage.

Aidan tried to hide a choke when the stench of the blood nearly threatened to overwhelm him.

Suren made a step forward in his direction, her right hand lifted and she indicated to the table.

"You´re free to take with you what is yours!"

Her voice icy and dripping with contempt.

You´re free to take with you what is yours! Aidan felt the urge to go right for her pale throat. Take, what is yours! That sounded like he was going to take with him any technical device, not a so hopefully still alive being.

For a moment he felt his eyes going black when they still hadn´t done this before when he smelled the stench of the blood. Henry´s blood. The smell of his blood had hit him full force, reminding him of the moment when in 1918 the French soldier had stabbed Private Henry Durham and the blood gushed out from the wound in his belly. It has had a specific smell as every person´s blood had an individual smell, even when the vampire blood had a slightly different smell, but he might have smelled Henry from the distance among others.

Her eyes stung into his, her view cold and there was a smile of satisfaction on her face like that of a person who was proud for what she had done with perfection.

He fought down the urge to attack, to kill her whether Henry would be alive or dead. He also fought down the cry that was rising in his throat. To cry the question right into her face if Henry was alive. Once she had been his lover but now all he felt was hatred and he could kill her right away. The discrepancy hurt him more than her knife could have hurt him.

Instead of that he slowly came nearer to the table where her hand indicated to.

"Get him out of here! Do with his body whatever you want. But his skin stays with me!" Her hand directed to a another large sheet of foil, covering the ancient orient rug and when Aidan looked over there his breath and his heartbeat almost stopped.

On the foil lay, outspread like a freaky copy of a hunting trophy, Henry´s bloodstained skin in one piece. Cut open and off like a bodysuit with a long large zipper.

It was really perfectly done in her curse ridden eyes.

Aidan had to take and fought for all of his controls not to vomit right over his feet in front of her. The sight of this was much worse than anything he had expected.

Clearly she could see it in his face, the shock and the disgust at the same moment but he didn´t want to give her the final satisfaction to see him stagger and fall.

He had come for Henry and he was determined to take him away from here. Dead or alive.

With controls won back he turned over to the table where no sounds came from. No screams, no groan, even not the slightest moaning.

Henry was lying on the foil, blood ran down in little rivulets over the edge of the table, dropped to the ground where it built up little red glistening pools.

Suren had not only skinned his whole body but also his face and head. She hadn´t spared the smallest inch of body. His whole body was covered in blood that was much too wet, even not dried over to the slightest. Suren must have finished her maniac work only moments before and due to the pool of blood under the table and the wetness Henry was swimming in on the foil he must have lost at least two and a half liters if not more.

And before this, his hands and his face had been covered with burns from the uninviting, so must have been his whole body under his clothes. Alone this would have been enough to need blood for a healing. Henry had been weakened before Suren started her vicious work on him...

A mortal, a human being would have died of volume loss shock and Aidan was not sure if Henry was still alive. His eyes were closed amidst a terrible fake of a mask of blood. There were no recognizable facial features left.

He looked like a shocking human shaped copy of the zombie dog in Resident Evil.

Aidan cringed at the thought that sprang to his mind, now and here.

It was so strange, he started to fear for his own mind´s health.

That of Suren was out of the question.

Aidan concentrated his hearing to a heartbeat from the table, a shallow breath or any sign that Henry was still alive. He could barely hear his heart beating. Robbed of most of the blood volume his system fought for every single heartbeat like the vanishing sound of a bell far, far away.

"Henry! Henry, can you hear me?" Aidan bowed over his son, aware not to stain himself with the blood Henry was swimming in.

It took an eternity until a slight moan escaped a mouth that opened to a slit. Henry´s teeth were covered in his own blood, so that Aidan for a moment thought Suren had even skinned his gums. But it came clear that he had swallowed parts of his blood that ran into his mouth when he fought for breath under the all excruciating pain before he hopefully had lost consciousness finally.

"Henry?"

He could merely breath, the less speak, even whisper.

"Don´t try to speak, Henry. Stay quiet. I´ll get you out of here. Don´t exactly know how. But I´ll get you out of here now. I´ll give you shelter and you will be safe until you are healed, irrespective of how long it will take.

_God! I´m making promises to you I´m not even sure I´ll be able to keep them. What if Josh won´t let you in? _

Aidan knew that Suren was still behind him, following all what he did with cold amusement like a freaky master of torture. She had not only almost killed Henry but she tortured him, Aidan, with the necessity to act like a stone cold indifferent to keep himself together in order to handle Henry, fully aware that whatever he would do, he would cause Henry more and new almost unbearable pain. And he had nothing at hand even to soften his torture at least a little bit before he started to transport Henry out of that cursed House.

His eyes went over the body or what was left over of it. Aidan had to fought down his tears from rising. He even didn´t dare to touch Henry with his bare hands. Not because of risking an infection of which he wasn´t sure now. Burnt humans were very receptive for multiple infections and Aidan didn´t know if that belonged also to a vampire in this condition.

"Henry? C´mon, give me a sign you´re still alive..." Aidan stood beside the table, his eyes narrowing when he saw Suren smiling coldly as if she enjoyed his helpless undecidedness. He bared his teeth, a low growling rumbled in his chest and he shot her an stone cold glare, before he turned around and left for his bag that was waiting in the foyer.

Within seconds he was back in the large meeting room...no...torture chamber was the right word for what she had turned the room to.

He ripped open the zipper of the sports bag and his hands went in for a pair of gloves to cover his hands, not to protect them from the blood but to prevent an infection onto Henry for which he wasn´t certain.

In the moment he wasn´t quite certain of anything.

The only thing he knew was that he would have to get Henry out of here as fast as possible. Taking him away from Suren and her vengefulness.

The price Henry had paid was way too high.

Aidan took a thick layer of gauze pads and tried to soak up the blood but after a short moment he learned to know that it would be useless. He turned around, his eyes searching for something he could use to cover Henry but the only thing he had was the gown he had brought from the hospital.

"Henry, can you hear me? We must get you out of here and I´ll have to dress you in this gown... where for I have to move you...I´m so sorry, Henry! Hope, won´t hurt too much...", he whispered.

Aidan called for all his experience in handling motionless patients like he did in the hospital where he worked as a nurse. In general Henry made no difference in the very moment.

When he tried to lift Henry´s head and back to sit him up, as heavy as his limp body seemed to be, Henry´s lips opened and a deep groan escaped his lips. It sounded so tortured, so painful that Aidan nearly shrugged back, letting him drop back to the table missing only by reflexes.

Henry´s eyes were coal black, his fangs extended and his groans went on and on.

"Le...me! Ca...can...t ! Ra...ther. Die!" His head sunk back and his eyes shut when his face tensed under what must be terrible pain.

"Henry..I´ll..." Aidan realized that he couldn´t go on like that. Henry would...

He turned over to Suren, his eyes burning with anger and his voice became a hissing when he barked at her:

"What have you done?" His hand indicated Henry´s limp form; "Take what is mine! Take him home! But HOW? Can´t even move him to the slightest amount! What did you think when you started THIS?"

"That´s part of the punishment! I told you he´ll have to pay a price for what he had done that eight decades ago. He forced me ground under!", she spat right into his vamped out face.

"Henry didn´t start that all! You yourself were responsible for what you had done by killing this mortal woman in best vampire manner before the very eyes of all these mortals in here. You revealed your skills which should have been hidden from mortal eyes! You started what ended up in that massacre! It was you who shed all that blood of innocents!"

Her eyes spat fire and her voice was razor sharp.

"Get him out of here before I´ll change my mind! You won´t even dare to disobey my orders!"

Aidan stared at her and he had to fought for control when he answered to her demand.

"Then give me some help anyway! I´ll get him out of here as soon as he can move..." His voice was calm only by his vampire powers when his heart was racing with anger instead.

She smiled like nothing had happened, turned over to another guardian and gave out her order. She kept a civil tongue in his head but he could hear a barely hidden contempt from her voice. Which poured oil into the fire of his anger, but he had to bite it down. For Henry´s sake.

"Bring in the MST and give it to Aidan! He should know how to use it!"

Aidan stared at her, his mind cringing with despair. He couldn´t believe what he had heard but a moment later the guardian was back with a small paper box and a vinyl box with needles and syringes.

The view of it, the thought of what Henry had gone through and what could have been prevented at least when she only would have had the mercy to make use of the MST...

His mind raced with nearly unbearable anger and his hands shook when he filled the syringe. But he forced himself to reign in his anger, his hatred as long as he would have to handle with Henry.

"Henry! That´ll do! Only a few moments... I don´t know what it will do to your body but we don´t have time to test it out now...", he whispered when he bowed down to Henry and shot him the morphine. Aidan had never shot morphine before but he knew how to do injections basically.

The question was if it would work enough to get Henry out of here and bring him to his home before he finally would collapse right in the street. Let us find it out! There was no choice left over.

Henry let out a sound in between an unbearable groan and a relaxed sigh and his eyes went shut. Aidan suppressed the intention to turn over to Suren whose view he felt in his back like a living thing of ice.

She was nothing less than a cold-hearted mere heartless monster walking among the living and the undead.

Aidan kept his sight on Henry, waiting for the time he estimated for the morphine to develop its full force and then he started to dress Henry into the hospital gown, the slippers and over all; the blue rain cape, carefully closing the hood over the bloody hairless skull, trying to ignore the groans and moans which came from his son.

Henry stood halfway upright but he looked as if he would sink to the ground at any second. His hands under the cape were shaking and from under the hood came the sounds of a shallow and unsteady breath. When Aidan lead him out of the room Henry was staggering and seemed to fight for every single step.

"I beg you, Henry! Keep upright as long as we have Suren in our back!" Aidan whispered to him; "Be strong!"

When they reached Aidan´s car he opened the door on the passenger´s side. For a moment he wasn´t quite certain how to manage it to help Henry into the seat. He didn´t dare to touch him but Henry wouldn´t make it inside without help.

"Okay...come on...I´m sorry but I have to give you a helping hand...", Aidan stared into the terrible disfigured face. Henry was wavering, his hands trembling and saliva dripped from his mouth. His eyes bled black, the lids sticky with blood. Aidan moaned under his breath. The sight of his son was worse than what he had expected. To tell the truth he had denied it to imagine what he would find here. He had denied it to think of the days when he had skinned hunted...but dead then...animals. The relation to his son was too...

disgusting.

What Suren had done was disgusting.

_There´s no such thing like the revenge of a scorned woman..._

Carefully he grabbed for Henry´s arm to support him. With the other hand he lifted the cape so far that it wouldn´t get jammed under him when Henry was sitting down.

"C´mon! I don´t want to pull any attention on us! Won´t be that good to get caught with a bleeding vampire beside...", Aidan urged him to some certain hurry. But Henry stood there trembling, didn´t make any movement.

"Henry?...Henry! Go on! We don´t have time to waste to get you away from here!"

The only answer were a row of moans and when Aidan looked into the face under the hood, black eyes stared at him in pure dullness.

"Henry?" He waved a hand in front of his son. No reaction. Aidan sighed. The necessity to shot him morphine now took its toll. Henry was on the edge to unconsciousness, stoned up to the cortex. He couldn´t expect any cooperation from him.

Aidan nervously looked around but the street was empty of pedestrians at this time. With grim determination he shoved Henry into the passenger´s seat and for this he was granted with a scream, followed by another one when he placed Henry´s feet in the foot space.

"I know, I know...but we have to go through this...I´m sorry, but it won´t take long..." he tried to soothe Henry but his son was totally apathetic. Aidan closed the door and sped around the car and took the driver´s seat. He had to concentrate on the traffic, totally aware that Henry was beside him or what Suren had left over from him. Aidan bit down so hard his fangs pierced his lower lip and he smelled his own blood. He hissed and his fingers clung to the steering wheel so hard that the plastic crackled.

_To be continued_


	3. Chapter 3 On the threshold to darkness

_**Chapter 3**_

_**On the threshold to darkness**_

He didn´t look for how much time they needed and didn´t even care for when they finally reached their home.

Henry whispered something, his voice was weak and tired beyond imagination. Not only this drug that circled through his system but his enormous loss of blood made his whole body trembling with weakness. At least whatever Aidan had shot him tilted his excruciating pain enough that he could walk slowly step by step.

_Aidan´s voice came from far away. His head felt numb and strangely enough his gums too. His lips seemed to have gone to the size of a pillow. Numb, fluffy and cold. His head was drifting and the blood whooshed in his ears in an unsteady rhythm. His lids stuck to the corners of his eyes and a thin layer of red liquid shaded his eyesight. He fought for breath, trying to hear himself breathing just to make sure he could hear or feel anything. The wind was hissing in the folds of whatever Aidan must have pulled over his head and it felt as if the whatever was the only reason that his head was not falling off his body, not any longer being fixed to his shoulders. His whole body, if still existing, was falling apart. _

_Aidan was speaking to him but the words dissolved into fog, pumping fog, pulsing back and forth by some force that seemed to be connected to his heartbeat. His feet made shuffling noises which seemed to reverberate from the sidewalk flagstones. He couldn´t remember to have gotten out of the car. If there ever had been a car. The stairs seemed to pile up to an endless passage upon a mountain and he almost missed the gesture with which Aidan meant him to stop finally. He was shaking but he was afraid that he would stuck to the railing when he would try to get hold of the cold iron. That it would turn into glowing heat under the bloody claws into which his fingers had turned._

"Don´t worry Henry! I´ll get you inside. Josh is a good friend of mine and he knows what we are. He´s very friendly...", he answered in a whispering voice.

Aidan took a deep breath and pressed the door bell.

_The sound of the bell was pounding in his ears, in his head. Frame...any green frame was in front of him and a glistening surface. He would drop to the ground by now, the ground that made some efforts to jump right into his face... The sounds around him dissolved into a hollow humming, growing louder and ebbing away again._

Once. Twice.

Nothing happened.

God! Josh was at home for sure. His shift was over and normally he always went home first after work.

He pressed the door bell button for the third time.

Inside the house Sally sat on the large couch. The door bell rang multiple times. Impatiently. Josh came sped down the stairs from the upper bedroom.

"What´s up? Who´s that? Did you check the door?", he asked her while he went for the front door.

"Don´t know! Sally didn´t check! Old Sally checked", Sally shrugged her shoulders.

Josh reached out for the door knob. Aidan should have made use of his key, he thought. He wanted to ask him for it later. He opened the door and found Aidan standing outside, beside a some..._thing_, some..._one_? covered in a blue biker´s cape.

Josh indicated the hooded unknown.

"Who...?"

"It´s a good friend of mine. I need you invite him in..."

"Invite him in? We don´t do that...!" Josh protested. When Aidan begged him for an invitation, there was only one possibility left; a vampire! Who else would need his invitation as he was a _human_. To some certain degree at least, even if not entirely...for the wolf part.

"It´s different! This is Henry. It was a long time ago...I made him, Josh. He´s my son!"

Josh got a slight sight of what was hidden under the rain cape for good reason.

What he saw made his heart waver for a moment. His look went down the hidden figure. Blood covered every inch, every limp. Blood soaked slippers covered feet that were not only naked but stripped off skin.

"Did you make him without skin?" Josh spat at him, his voice risen. His view changed from Henry to Aidan who gestured to him to low down his voice.

"Must you be that loud? Don´t wanna hear us everybody around!", he growled with an angry voice.

He didn´t want the whole neighborhood to become witness of what was going on here.

"Please let him in!", Aidan urged.

Josh muttered anything under his breath. He was rather restrictive to that since Bishop tried to kill Aidan.

He looked at Henry whose hands were trembling violently. Clearly he was short before collapse. The minimal parts of his body that were visible indicated that he must have lost a very large amount of blood if this was his whole body´s condition. Henry would go right into volume loss shock and he wondered how in heaven he came up to here from where ever he was brought by Aidan.

Josh made a step back, tilted his head slightly to one side, indicating the inside of the house;

"Fine!"

Aidan stared at him somewhat bewildered, bowed slightly and waved his right hand in demanding circles.

"Please a little bit more, Josh!", he begged to his friend. A simple _fine_ wouldn´t do.

Henry peered at Josh from under his hood, his eyesight shaded by a fog of morphine and weakness. _What does it take so long? He felt like he would drop to the ground any second. His strength had gone with the first screams of agony when Suren started her vicious work with that damned Viking knife. Excruciating agony that had taken away his breath, made his heart falter and he had begged to God for his death before finally his body pulled the emergency brake and he had lost consciousness. _

A simple _fine_.

Not enough to make sure that Henry could enter safely and seek shelter without at last got burned down to ashes by being uninvited.

"Enter... I invite you...mi casa e su casa...", Josh said and stepped back with his hand waving Henry inside.

"That´ll do!" Aidan turned to Henry, waved him inside, crossing the threshold. Josh gave in with a sigh and a thought came to his mind.

_The bonds you form with some people will make you look past anything...ignore what they´ve become...You´ll hang onto the version you wanna remember, not the one in front of you now. Friends, parents, mentors; we hold onto that idealized image of them...even it´s an illusion, because if we can´t believe in them, what does that say about us? Remembering that best version of our friends remind us that we were that promising once...that strong, that alive._

Henry felt Aidan softly shove him inside the house by his arm. So carefully Aidan acted it almost made him cry out irrespective the morphine he had gotten. Henry knew from own experience that there was a slim line between an analgesic dosage under which one could move without losing consciousness and the simple narcotic state that would send even him straight down to the ground.

Sally stared at Henry for a moment, then she grunted at Aidan: "I'm not baby-sitting your meatsicle."

_Might gonna kick your ass, Sally, if ever you would have one! _Aidan thought angrily. _The iron poker was out of_ _reach and he had other business to do now! Sally could be so cheekily sometimes._

Aidan led him over to a staircase and Henry found himself confronted with an almost impossible to manage situation. _To climb up stairs again...a No Go! Why in heaven didn´t he simply let him fall onto that couch here on the first floor? He could simply die on a couch too! On the battlefields of WW 1 soldiers had died in mud, smoke and blood and among bodies torn to shreds! Instead... _

"Sorry! You have to climb upstairs to be safe. Where I can help you...", Aidan whispered into his ear when he saw Henry stagger and hesitate out of reason.

Henry will have to feed to heal, he thought. I will have to get blood inside here for him. Henry wouldn´t be able to go out for his fill. Hopefully he will make it upstairs...

Josh stood on the first floor, his eyes full of concern. He shook his head in slightly disagreement to what was going on in his house. Of course!. Aidan was his friend but bringing in another vampire... A vampire who was seriously hurt... A vampire who would need blood to heal. Blood in an amount beyond normal. That tended to go wrong...

Josh had a bad feeling about that and decided he didn´t want to become a witness to it.

"I´ll go for work...", Josh sounded uncertain, slightly disgusted and then he made it for the door to leave. His face was split with discrepancy.

Aidan was too much fixed onto Henry to care for how Josh reacted. He could imagine what was going on in his friend´s mind but whatever it was...he had to ignore it now.

He had started it. That was the point of no return now!

He couldn´t step back from it now, neither could Henry! Aidan felt a knot in his throat and it tightened around his heart like a steel band. He could only hope that Henry would make it through this without ending up in a disaster. _Why in heaven and hell have I not thought about it earlier? Why the heck didn´t I bargain for another option for Henry? What shit had Suren spit in my mind that I only could give in to _this_? _A wave of hatred for her swept over him and for a moment it could banish the iron knot in his throat. Iron! Heaven! The whole air in the room smelled of iron, the scent was so strong that it was filling all his senses down to the core. Shaking the iron bars of the cage that held back the animal, the vampire within him. The scent was hanging in the air like a cloud, spreading all around this one moment when Henry had crossed the threshold.

It was so intense that Josh might smell it even though it wasn´t the wolf time of the month; the days before full moon when his senses became sharper, his ability to smell, to taste and to sniffle around intensifying..

Henry climbed up the stairs, his bloody skinless fingers not able to cling to the wooden railing. He heard and felt Aidan behind him, supporting him.

_Words were in his ears but the pain made his blood rushing in his ears. Humming and vibrating. The walls moved in and back and fog was hanging in front of his eyes. His knees threatened to give in and he gasped when his head seemed to fall off his shoulders. Unbearable heat was crawling up his spine, grabbed for his head and suddenly his head became cold as ice. The wall in front of him almost disappeared when a black cloud shaded his sight and in a reflex he wanted to grab for a hold. There was none... Aidan! Help me! His voice was strangely hollow and the words drifted away into a black hole..._

Aidan opened the door to the bedroom and Henry staggered inside with last strength. _Light burned in his eyes and there was a massive beige and brown anything in front of him and all he wanted was to get to it. Anything within him was telling him with a nasty, angry voice that he should make it for the whatever...whatever it was! Call it instincts, call it...hunger. The room was wavering around him and he felt himself stumbling. The brown wall seemed to jump away and anyway he_ _reached the beige surface. Where´s Aidan? Aidan, help me!_ _A foggy shape that seemed to belong to what? What was it? His mind fought to remember. Wood...? Any wood? A wooden bed frame. His breath was hissing in his ears and he stumbled. _

Henry let himself sink down on the corner of the bed. He expected new pain but the bed was soft and a comfort to his tortured body in difference to the make shift torture table he had been placed on at Suren´s House.

Aidan carefully peeled the hood of the rain cape back from Henry´s head. Under it was a layer of large sized aluminum covered sheets, used for severe burns.

Even this material stuck to the surface when Aidan carefully tried to uncover Henry´s head. He felt so sorry for him, causing additional pain now.

Henry´s teeth clenched and he let out a loud groan, his face tensed with pain what caused new pain when muscles tensed under the skinless surface.

"Be careful...can´t...Didn´t ya learn...a thing?" Henry choked. Tears started from his now bled black eyes.

"I know but you have better to be strong now..." Aidan tried to soften him. He knew pretty well that he was rising new pain but the faster they went through undressing the better for him. He was kneeling in front of Henry and carefully opened the folds of the rain cape, peeled it down the shoulders and then down his arms. Then he found himself confronted with getting him out of the hospital shirt. Wouldn´t it have been for getting Henry in and out of his Volvo under the eyes of the public, he could have covered him with a rescue foil instead.

The light material was stained with blood that glistened in the light of the lamp under the ceiling. It was soaking wet. The scent of it was nearly overwhelming and Aidan felt his hunger rising by instinct. The intense smell of blood was always a trigger for his basic vampire instincts. Even in the hospital it was difficult to control them when he was hungry and confronted with large amounts of blood, working in the Emergency Room.

Aidan pressed his teeth together, swallowed hard and his fingers were slippery from blood within seconds when he peeled the shirt down from Henry´s shoulders and arms. He had to pull carefully where the material stuck to the muscle tissue. Aidan hissed with disgust under his breath. This was worse than what he had imagined before.

Henry moaned deeply and the moans became screams when Henry´s walls broke. His face torn with pain, his fangs bared and his eyes bled black and wide. Aidan almost stopped but forced himself to go on. The faster he would be the better for his son.

Eyes stared into Aidan´s. The gaze so tortured, so desperate it nearly broke Aidan´s heart. Henry´s lips moved and little drops of blood appeared on the split surface. Words. Almost inaudible.

"Plea...se!" Breathing. Pause. "Stake. Me!"

Aidan felt a hot flame burning through his heart, his pulse speeding up and a wave of hot nausea swept over him. Almost pulling his legs away under him at the sheer thought of it.

No! No! He would never do that! Not to Henry! His Henry! His son! He had lost a son once before.

Aidan stared into the black eyes that were pure begging.

Henry was begging for his...death.

"No! No!" he answered with grim determination.

Henry groaned and his head fell back in despair. To reign himself in, Aidan dressed him in the dressing gown that hung from a hook at the wall near the door. It would get soaked through within short time but there was the need to give Henry a hint of unsuspicious of normality Henry was a shivering picture of misery.

Henry rose a hand to touch his temple that was oozing with blood, but he stopped dead in his movement.

"You made it eighty years...", Aidan said to him. He felt himself trembling and his face was near to break out in tears, but with much effort he kept control.

"Can´t live like that...it´s worse live...like that..." ,Henry moaned.

Aidan knew what he meant. It sounded so hopelessly as to go on like that. Living like that. Without skin. His face was contorted with inner pain and he didn´t know how to comfort Henry. Aidan tried to ignore the hurtful moaning that came out of Henry´s sore throat, helped him to sink back on the bed, his back upholstered by a pile of cushions.

"Okay, that´s it. You made it Henry...", he said softly. "Relax and try to sleep...if you can. I couldn´t shot you more of the morphine out there. I´m sorry but otherwise you wouldn´t have been able to walk to my home."

Bloodied lips moved when Henry whispered anything. Aidan merely heard the word.

"Wa...ter...I´m...thirsty..."

Aidan nodded.

"I will bring you blood and some water now..."

Aidan filled a glass with water and placed a straw in it.

Henry´s eyes got a hungry glare. He must be thirsty beyond imagination. Don´t dare to think about how much liquid he´d lost. Normally I should get him an infusion, he thought. Maybe later on when he would have fed.

Aidan shook his head and sank onto the edge of the bed, his hand lifted the glass and he carefully placed the straw between Henry´s dry and bloody lips.

Henry began to suck up the water. In a reflex he tried to take hold of the glass, but his fingers were slippery and he looked at his hands with a deep moan. His face, would he have been able for an expression, got a helpless expression when he gave up. Henry tried to rise his hand but it sank down with weakness.

"Is there still pain, Henry?" Aidan´s voice was full of sorrow when he forced himself to look into the ruined face of his son.

The _Yes_ was whispered so weakly it was barely audible.

"Ne...need...blood! Gim´me blood..." Henry choked. He stared at Aidan, his view wavering, his lips trembling. It took him a strenuous effort to form some words. "Need...Please. So...hurts...Ca...Can´t!

His lips went bloody when the delicate surface split and little drops of blood, equal to a sparkle, appeared on the surface. Henry seemed to be at the end of the line.

Aidan glared at him, his view uncertain and his mind was racing. Henry needed blood. He needed to feed at any cost.

He couldn´t get him blood from the hospital. He was cut off from that source for himself since they changed the key card code and had installed a camera to guard the entrance of the blood bank in the Boston Suffolk. Why for hell didn´t I think about this most important question _before_ I decided to take Henry with me? This question tortured him and finally the moans that were coming from the bed woke him out of his thoughts.

He lifted his head and looked at Henry. For seconds their eyes met. The incredible cerulean ones of Henry bled black when he tried to move his head. Bled black not by hunger but from pain. Aidan could see it in his whole features. The moaning that came out from between his lips made Aidan moving merely by his own will.

His hand moved into the pocket of his hoodie. His fingers felt the little box he had shoved into his pocket when the guardian and even Suren hadn´t looked at him.

Henry´s eyes clung to his hand. He seemed to know or at least to have an uneasy sense of what it contained.

The black pools of his eyes a plea.

Aidan dropped his view, turned aside.

_God! Henry had tried to provide him with morphine when he was brought into the field hospital before he would start to get the bullet out of his leg and care for his injuries..._

Aidan closed his eyes for a moment then he took out the box and filled a new syringe. He turned around and came to Henry´s side.

No! I won´t let you suffer anymore!, he thought. Then he bent down and carefully grabbed for Henry´s arm, ignoring the tremble and the pain ridden moans, placed the needle into the raw flesh where he knew to be the line of the vein.

It seemed to be so crazy to pierce a vein as almost every vein that once had been under the skin was now lying on the bare surface, pouring out its content, adding to the wet glistening that covered Henry from his head to his toes.

´Please!´ Henry´s lips formed the word inaudible but Aidan understood without hearing.

Henry gave a deep sigh when the morphine flooded his arm.

"Pst...relax...relax...it´ll better soon. You know this..." He would have liked to touch his temple, would have liked to comfort him, to tell him that everything will be better as soon as he would drink enough blood.

_To drink blood!_

_I can´t feed him! Not with my own blood. He needs more than a normal fill to heal. More than I would be able to give! Even if I would go up to the border._

Henry´s head sank back and his eyes fell shut when the morphine finally took effect. The moaning subsided and his body went numb.

"Need...blood..."

Aidan nodded.

"I´ve promised you to care for you and get you blood! I´ll do so! Being back soon, Henry!" He helped him back into the cushions, then, after a last look, he left the bedroom and sped down the stairs.

Sally looked at him.

"What are you going for? What´s about him?" Her thumb directed upstairs.

"He´s not getting any better and he needs food."

"Oh, we are talking take out that comes in a bag or the kind with a pulse? You know what? Bring him a whole herd of cattle, what do I care?"

Aidan softly shook his head and left through the door. What the hell was going on with Sally? The normally jokey and always being up to fun ghost was dripping with cynicism.

Downstairs a door banged shut in his ears. The sound was only curbed by the distance and the dullness which filled his head.

Henry was lying on the bed. His mouth was slightly open and he breathed fast and flat, every breath a gasp.

At least the morphine had reduced the excruciating pain down to a level of still strong pain. He felt unbearable tired and despite the fact that he couldn´t move his head, the less his body, because of his condition, he felt dizzy like when he had drunken way too much back in his mortal time.

He gasped and his lips burned like fire. In a gesture of grace that was more to be called a mockery, Suren had spared them by exactly cutting down the delicate line where lips and normal skin met.

Aidan had provided him with some water to tilt the strongest urges but all of this was no substitute for…

…Blood

Henry tried to move his tongue over his lips in a reflex, but in his semi-unconscious state his mind was far too slow and the pain it caused woke him out of it for a moment.

_God! He couldn´t go on like this anymore. This wasn´t life but sheer torture. The remaining blood in his body was insufficient to heal him and his body seemed to have gone down to pure survival state. He weakly reminded that in a state of shock, the body concentrated on sustaining basic functions by reducing the blood circulation to organs that were essential for life like heart, liver and lungs._

_He didn´t know how much blood he had lost but it must have been a large amount, far beyond what was acceptable even for a vampire, the less to speak of a human being. Strangely enough, there had been these softly dripping, wet noises which his sensible vampire hearing had caught up when at any time he had woken up, out of the merciful blackness to which his brain had shut down. Suren must have finished her brutal work and Henry had desperately hoped to slip back into unconsciousness again. The room had been utterly silent for a moment but for her breath that had been calm and regular. Her task seemingly hadn´t cost her any effort, as if she was a well trained…butcher. That damn bitch._

_Seconds had stretched into an eternity and the dripping noises of his blood that fell down to the ground, building up dark glistening pools, were pounding in his ears with unexpected sharpness. Strange to notice which strategies the body developed to distract itself from unbearable situations like excruciating torture. When Henry´s mind drifted back to it, he couldn´t understand why. All his education as a medic in World War One could not prepare him for what he was going through now…_

The pain in his lips subsided a bit and he felt an overwhelming tiredness that threatened to pull him down into the abyss of unconsciousness again. Henry felt the urge to give himself over to it. His body screamed for relief and when it only would be a deep sleep or better...unconsciousness.

He had hold onto himself with all remaining force of will when he and Aidan had been in the large conference room, and she had offered him the only way to come back into the family which she had thought to be adequate for what he had done to her some eighty years ago…

It had needed him all strength not to let go and letting his face show his deadly fear in front of her. His heartbeat had gone straight through the ceiling and only the fact that he had to undress, had prevented his hands from shaking so wildly, that he wouldn´t have been able to keep them still.

Henry closed his eyes and the dim light in the room changed into darkness. Every breath, every slight movement took so much effort it almost drove tears into his eyes, but he doubted that his bled out body that was hovering at the edge of shock state could give any. All he knew from the past was that he lacked of any liquid; blood and water! Any corner of his mind that remembered what he once had learned about it, told him to save his strength for the moment when Aidan would come back with blood. Any which way. If in a bag or that with a pulse…

When it only would be fast and soon.

All his last strength had gone with the stairs he had climbed up, the few steps it took to reach a room that obviously was a bedroom. Aidan´s? It didn´t matter by now, only that he was placed onto a soft bed instead of the hardness of a wooden table. The blood was humming in his ears and with closed eyes he felt like tumbling around. The soft dressing gown began to stick to his body and turned partly red where blood soaked through. His fingers were too stiffened from pain and dried blood to peel it back and so he gasped deeply and let out a groan.

How should he ever be able to feed? The less taking blood from a living source. Aidan could not bring in a captive, pulling him in like a pig for the slaughter. He ever had fed on willing women and men, the point was lying on _willing_. Everybody who would enter the bedroom would run away in shock the very moment Henry came into sight. No one but hospital staff would be used to the sight of a bleeding, ninety-nine percent dead and skinless being…

_Why couldn´t Aidan simply provide him with transfusions? Didn´t Aidan ever think about it before he decided to bring him over here? He had to stay awake under all circumstances when Aidan would return sooner or later. And he begged it to be soon._

Henry doubted that he would stay alive much longer. His heartbeat sped up when he thought about a stake.

_A simple stake would do._

_A leg, broken from a nearby chair. To be driven through his skinless chest into the only weakly beating heart. He had been afraid of for eighty years when he had hidden from everyone, how it would be when the sharp tip went right into his heart, stopping it and he would finally dissolve into dust._

_The dust he should have been now since decades, counting onto a mortal life span._

_The room was wavering around him and his sight was shaded by the morphine. He won´t even made it up from the bed and over to the corner where a small chair was standing at the wall. No chance to get to it, the less to break off a leg for a stake..._

_enabling him to impale himself and to be released from the agony..._

_God! Show me mercy! Only this once! And let me die... Et dimitte nobis debita nostra...Libera nos a malo..._

Strange enough the words from the Pater Noster (* Our Father) came to his mind, the prayer he once had been taught by his father.

_His father who never got a chance to learn what his son had become. His father...his father...had been such a kind man. His father never had beaten him up, never punished him for mistakes or misbehave but tried to taught his son to become a man of honor and kindness. What a mercy that his father had died in the 50s and never learned to know which sins his son had committed since he was turned vampire. It would have broken his father´s heart..._

His lids closed again and Henry almost lost consciousness finally when the morphine pulled him down with the force of a sledgehammer…

_to be continued_


	4. Chapter 4 Voyage into darkness - Part 1

_**Chapter 4 **_

_**Annotation: **_I´ll give a short explanation here: CCS means a Casualty Clearing Station. The word came in use by the British Army during World War One and was used too in World War Two. The CCS is a makeshift field ambulance, mostly near behind the actual front-line, in which wounded soldiers are collected from medic points at the front-line. In a CCS they are checked for their condition, emergency care is done on them as a first surgery for example, in an attempt to stabilize them so that they can be transferred to military field hospitals for further treatment. Mostly a CCS was built up with simple tents (as we see in episode 9 of season 2), which could simply be moved due to the front-line´s movement. In better cases they could be installed in solid buildings as far as those were available under the conditions. The Clearing Station # 54 which Aidan mentions in the episode did really exist and it was moved from different locations to Aire/France, then to Merville and finally to Cambrin/France. As far as I could research the episodes events took place in the French Departement Nord-Pas-de-Calais which is in the North West of France, next to the border of Belgium.

So here we go:

_**Chapter 4**_

_**Voyage into darkness – Part One**_

He had to get blood for Henry.

Blood. Blood was essential...as it always had been...

_France 1918;_

_The mud was spurting all around him. The walls and the ground of the trench were wet and slippery from the rain but he was running along it. Only his running skills had enabled him to reach the trench before the Germans even had a chance to aim their guns at him. He went for the first of the soldiers and shot him right into the head from a short distance. The man´s brain sprayed at the wall and he fell down to the ground. Aidan took his next target, aimed and pulled the trigger of his handgun but it only clicked as the magazine was empty! Aidan shoved his gun into the belt and literally jumped at the next opponent, ready to end it with bare hands..._

_...or his fangs._

_He was on kinda rampage and the smell of blood was firing up his vampire instincts. His teeth dropped in position without any effort or even him intending it. Aidan growled loudly when he grabbed the soldier next to him with bare hands. His teeth dug deep into the throat and he bit down hard, ravaging flesh and veins. He spit out parts of meat and lifted his head. The German next to him screamed with panic, his hands moved up and trembling allover, he tried to aim at Aidan. Aidan growled at him, had him by the throat before the man had a chance to fire his gun and his body went limb when Aidan snapped his neck with one forceful move. When his next opponent tried to go for him, Aidan pulled the corpse up from the ground, using him as a human shield and the body shook in his hands when the bullets drove into the lifeless soldier._

_With a beastly growl Aidan threw the corpse to the ground and jumped forward..._

_None of the Germans had been prepared for such an attack. They were trained to shoot, to slash throats with knives or stab an enemy with bayonet supplied guns. Fighting in a trench instead from out of it was a hazardous thing to take, but..._

_a human shaped monster with hands, claws and fangs, ripping them to pieces while he/it had gone on a deadly rampage...the allies must have gone down to hell for companionship!_

_Bodies in a row covered the ground of the trench, bloodied, contorted, dead or dying. There was chaos behind and around him and screams and shouting, mixed with the disturbing noises of artillery fire. _

_Another of the Germans shouted at him, cursing when he stumbled back and Aidan grabbed the other man , snapped his neck and when he went for the man who had stared at his bled black eyes in horror, the soldier lifted his handgun. Before Aidan reached him, the soldier shot, emptying his entire magazine..._

_The first bullet went into his right thigh and almost pulled his leg off under him. Aidan screamed with pain and there was only the fast staccato of the German gun and the soldier shouted with rage, when he was shooting and shooting and shooting..._

_...until Aidan went to the ground, his body riddled with at least a dozen bullets. Even for him too much to take! The world immersed in waves of almost unbearable pain and before he lost consciousness, his last thought was; That´s it! Going dusted by a damn German soldier!_

_He was waking up from and sinking back again into unconsciousness alternately by wildly shaking movements... Why the hell couldn´t the men take care of it...? A tent frame came into sight, was slipping through above him and he screamed with pain when the gurney was carried into the CCS tent. There was a voice..._

"_He had taken the whole trench all alone! Never seen so much blood on a single soldier...!"_

"_Guess he won´t make it until morning..." another voice stated. Damn, they had already given up on him! He would show them how..._

_The world turned black again._

_The gurney was roughly set on a table and he woke up again when the bounce was hard enough. Aidan groaned with pain and in a reflex he tried to get hold of the table´s edge...with no success. Anybody appeared at his side and his sight blurred when he tried to look at the man. When his sight became better again he saw a damn young face above him, a rather young medic with brown hair and eyeglasses. He immediately bent over him, looking at him in deep concern._

_Get that going! Aidan cursed under his breath, the pain in his whole body almost sending him back into blackness._

"_What do we have here...?" the medic mumbled when his hands went for Aidan´s leg, carefully pulling away the split material of the trouser leg. It stuck with blood and the medic´s fingers turned red in less than a moment. Aidan could read it in the medic´s eyes that his leg had to be a mess. The blood loss threatened to pull him down finally. Anybody had to get him a damn transfusion...if any blood was still available...! The medic turned over to a small table beside, his hand was grabbing a syringe. God, get me the damn stuff and get these bullets out, man!_

_A doctor entered the compartment and took the syringe from the medic´s hand..._

"_He´ll be dead before dawn, Private! We don´t waste morphine on a dying man!" he said and in the next moment he was out of the compartment again, the medic shot him an uncomprehending look and turned to him again. He seemed to think about what to do best now that he had to handle a severely hurt soldier without anesthetics..._

_Aidan groaned and grabbed for the medic´s arm. The man twitched from obvious pain but Aidan didn´t care for._

"_Get. Them. Out!" he groaned with last strength; "Get the damn bullets out!" His bloodied fingers fell down on the table again._

_The young medic nodded and in a haste he closed the seams of the tent, turned back to him again. Pain! The pain would almost drive him mad, it already did! The bullets had to be removed and it had to happen fast now! Before he would start to scream down the whole CCS ! The wounds wouldn´t close with the bullets in his flesh nor would the bleeding be stopping! He had already lost too much blood and with more blood gone even a vampire could die! He had simply underestimated the situation in the trench and why the heck had he gone for it all alone instead of waiting for reinforcement? Damn shit! But now it was too late to regret it...already paying the prize for it! Aidan cursed in his mind while he pulled off his belt with shaking hands. He folded it over and shoved it between his teeth, biting down hard with all his remaining strength in an attempt to compensate the disturbing pain when the medic would get the bullets out, without any morphine..._

"_Are you ready...?" the medic asked in a very low voice. Aidan nodded silently, readying himself for the pain. All he could imagine, it would be worse..._

_In the worst case nature would hopefully send him back into unconsciousness...if so. If not... He didn´t dare to think about it. The air smelled of blood. Blood was everywhere. The air was thick with it and it was closing in on him like a cloud of fog, a cloud of smoke, wet and liquid, streaming down into his windpipe, into his throat. He had to get blood! Had to get it, had to get to it any which way...even if he had to kill for it again! The tempting smell grew to a stench and the stench was filling his whole body. Can kill for it, can kill for it...! _

_The thin metal spudger went into his flesh when the medic carefully tried to peel the bullet out of the gaping hole. Aidan groaned and the pain was disturbing. He tried to concentrate on the leather between his clenched teeth. He tried to concentrate on the salty taste, the tanned taste of it, tried to concentrate onto the feeling of his teeth pressing into the leather as hard as he could. Tried to concentrate on the gun salvos and the sounds of exploding shrapnel, artillery shells and the howling of shell splinters outside the CCS. All in an attempt to distract him from the excruciating pain when the medic poked in his leg to get the bullet out of it. It was a relief when he heard it drop into the kidney dish._

_Number one._

_Of a dozen._

_It seemed to have taken hours until the medic got finished with him. Aidan groaned and blackness swept over him when the young Private fixed a bandage around his shoulder. He lost consciousness finally..._

The wind was cold and the air smelled of the upcoming winter.

He had to get blood for Henry.

"_What is your name, Private?" he felt that at least he had a right to know the name of the man who had tried to save his life, who cared for him. This medic was rather young, obviously one of these men who barely had grown up from childhood when the war had sucked them up into its chaos._

"_Durham. Henry Durham..." Blue eyes under simple eyeglasses, brown hair which was combed back and the smooth face of an barely adult man. Strangely enough he felt attracted to him, even up to the point when he felt the urge to...taste him...in every way... Blood, he was in need of blood! _

No food in a bag. He couldn´t go to the hospital for it as he won´t have access to the blood bank now. The only possibility to feed him would be in form of living sources who necessarily were to to be brought home because Henry couldn´t go anywhere for his fill. Josh would rip his ass to pieces when he learned to know that Aidan had broken rule number one; no feeding in their home but from bagged food! And bagged food was specified as blood bottles. It definitely excluded meal-on-legs! Food that was coming in with a pulse as Sally had so eloquently put it when he was leaving the house.

It was an agreement that Aidan wouldn´t feed on any human in their home and what could be worse than bringing in a meal on legs then for another vampire? Aidan had full understanding that Josh was extremely reluctant about inviting Henry in as it hadn´t been so long ago that a vampire had intruded their home...without such thing as an invitation. Bishop had risked to get crispy in an attempt to stake Aidan. Josh had seen the spreading burns on Bishop´s face when he jumped for the window again. If he would have been able to bring Bishop down in the living room, the vampire would have finally turned into ashes. Same fate that had happened to the poor orphans last night.

Who was responsible for cutting him off from the so urgently needed sources? Sources that prevented him from probably killing an unwilling donor. He had the suspect that Suren had her fingers in the pie with it.

Aidan felt reluctant to this idea.

Suren! The thought of the woman he once had loved was driving now cold and hot waves of hatred through his heart. She had almost tortured his son to death! And it was her who had pushed him into this situation now. Most of his love affairs had ended disastrous.

Suren turned out to become a nemesis.

Henry had been a difficult childe, eager and going for the top, a thing he had never imagined of him before he had turned him. The kind and gentle medic who told him that he would not be able to kill a man. Henry had changed in an incredible way after his turning. Had it been the vampire, the blood influence? He had chosen him to become his childe, his son. A son who could be annoying in some things, who had so often risen his anger until he had banished him from the vampire society at the evening of the Halloway massacre...

But he was still loving him unconditionally.

Even for all the anger Henry may have caused in the past, he didn´t deserve to pay such a price for his return. Suren could have done anything else as a punishment but...

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!

He knew all too well how thin the line, the border, would be between a normal controlled drinking, controlled by experience and self restriction, and a ravaging feeding, uncontrollable by wild hunger and pain. He was not sure if he would be able to control Henry, control his son under such a condition. When he had turned Private Henry Durham, wounded to death by a stake that was intended for him instead, he only had one seriously bleeding wound, not a whole body stripped of all skin by a vengeful woman.

If he won´t get blood for him, Henry would probably die.

To be a vampire was no guarantee to survive such an injury. Aidan knew from the hospital that this kind of injuries often enough lead to death by the loss of blood and liquids, shock and following infections. Severe burn disease.

_Worst of all was the mutilated face of his son; bled black eyes looking at him from a bloody mess. Suren hadn´t even spared Henry´s face from the torture. Every fine muscle was lying bare in his face, the ring-shaped muscles that framed the lips and the mouth and those which moved the eyelids. Every time when Henry tried to speak, blood was soaking from countless capillary vessels, covering his former facial features with a glistening layer of blood. The sight of Henry´s ruined face was more terrifying than the sight of his whole body. Henry´s face had still had the burns on it from canceling all invitations by selling the orphan house over to her human lawyer. I should have staked Suren instead the very moment she came up with her monstrous, hellish price... _

He barely felt the cold air when he turned over to the other side of the street. It was still early in the evening and there weren´t so much people out in the streets. No easy task to find someone he could compel into coming home with him.

Aidan strolled along a street where a club was, a dark bar where women and men met, went to dance and to drink.

Drink.

_You don´t wanna die, Henry? I won´t let you die! I won´t let you die! No matter how! No matter what I´ll have to do for it!_

His head was humming with the vibrating melody of the thought.

Aidan went alongside. The door was open and the music inside was so loud that Aidan started to fear for his hearing. How could these kids stand it any longer than a couple of minutes? Aidan shook his head in disbelief.

Two girls, merely women, came out of the bar and Aidan turned to them.

The sweet scent of their heated bodies swept over him like a hot wave. They must have been dancing just before as their pulse was faster than normal. He could take it by their heartbeats. Their hearts were pounding in his ears, so tempting...

Should have fed on my own before. Man! He hadn´t been feeding since the night before the orphan refuge had been blown up. Damn vampire politics!

"Hi ladies..." He smiled at them, spread his arms around their shoulders when he simply took the middle of them. "Wanna little bit more fun tonight?" His question sounded like a promise and the girls laughed. They looked at the man with the dark brown hair and the smirk in his face.

"What fun?" One of the girls asked and she put a hand on his arm. Aidan laid a hand over hers.

"I know, where a party is...at a friend´s. Wanna both of you come with me?" He padded her hand in a confidence inspiring manner.

The girl looked at her companion.

"Why not! Any complains?", she asked her.

"No. Fun´s always good. The club was so boring, maybe we´ll get to a better one with him!", she indicated to Aidan and smiled confidently, hooked her arm under Aidan´s and the trio went down the street.

"Okay, ladies...it´s not so far from here...", he promised. "We´ll be there soon...let´s go...!" When he mentioned it he could smell a hint of rising desire in the girl to his left. The sweet scent of arousal. The little lady getting ready for a one night stand. Aidan silently smiled and he hooked under more tightly. No chance for the little ladies to turn back now!

They strolled along the street, laughing and giggling.

When they reached the stairs to the door of the house, the younger of the girls stopped dead in her tracks. She listened over there, listening for definite sounds coming from inside, indicating a party. There were none.

She directed to the door with her hand; "IS that there...? There´s no party over there..." she complained. Her voice was disappointed and skeptical.

Aidan saw his plans going down the drain.

He had to regain control of the situation immediately.

_You´re not very good at compelling, Aidan!_ He heard the words of his once father in immortality; Bishop.

"Listen! It´s in there. My friend Henry is waiting for both of you...", he tried to convince her, his arms closing around the shoulders of both girls. His voice had gone all vampire compelling mode.

"You can´t wait to see Henry and whatever he needs..." he made a pause, just to make them more curious and when he felt their expectation growing, he went on and his voice had become a seductive whisper; "...you´ll give it to him!"

He smiled at them and patted their shoulders. His voice had not failed to have the effect he had intended. He could scent a sudden wave of arousal that emanated from both girls.

_Direct hit, Aidan! _

"Ooh...ooh...gonna get a little threesome..." she giggled and grabbed for the hand of her companion.

"It´s kind of...let´s say...private party ya´ know..." Aidan said to assure the fact that they were about a enjoy sex on a special occasion, regretting it later if they would let this chance slip away now. He smiled at both of them, his eyes went darker and his voice got a more convincing timbre.

"Follow me...you won´t regret it!"

The girls laughed and nodded and went up the stairs. Aidan grabbed the little bag one of them had lost. He opened the door to them and led them in. The living room was empty. Obviously Sally had gone out as she had definitely stated that she wasn´t about to baby-sit the...meatsicle...upstairs. Aidan´s refined sense of smell caught another whiff from the girl with the blond pony-tail.

_Guess that lady has soaked her panty dripping wet already_... Aidan smiled to himself. Henry would be able to feed soon and hopefully all would turn out well. Henry who once had saved his life and now it was Aidan´s turn. He directed to the stairs that led up to the second floor.

"Over here, ladies...second floor!"

_The CCS tent was crowded but by now the turmoil outside had subsided, at least for a while. Nobody was able to tell for how long, but whatsoever!? He heard steps on the ground that was covered with straw, mulched to get the clay beneath somewhat more dry. And the straw could be exchanged easily when it got wet or...soaked through with blood._

_He had been sleeping for a while, by exhaustion and in an attempt to shut off the gnawing hunger in his whole body. A hunger no human might be able to understand as it had a different intensity than a human´s normal hunger. Starving over a longer time meant to feel hunger that turned into pain, piercing in all veins first like an inner itching one can´t scratch on, then rising to a feeling like the veins were set on fire inwardly. The more when a vampire was in urgent need for blood like after a sever injury. Only blood could heal the wounds. No way out of this!_

_The sound of a body sitting down on a simple seat beside him made Aidan open his eyes. He turned his face to the side with a moan. Private Henry Durham had come in with a book in his hands. He opened it and when he saw that Aidan was awake he started to read aloud from it. Aidan listened to him, gave himself over to Henry´s voice. The young Private had a pleasant voice and he was able to emphasize the text at the right points. He would have made a perfect reader under other circumstances and he could imagine him reading to a child..._

_He closed his eyes and sighed a bit when his wounded body was hurting all over._

_The Private stopped reading; "You don´t like the author...?" Obviously he had thought that he felt bored by the text. Adan shook his head no._

"_You wanna listen further?"_

"_Just like to." Aidan gave back. Poor medic Durham did his best to give a wounded soldier some distraction of the good kind in his short time between two cases._

_When Aidan slightly moved the blanket slipped down from his shoulder and upper chest, baring his right shoulder and parts of the large bandage on his upper body. Private Durhams eyes grew wide when he got a look on Aidan._

_The deep wounds had closed over, the one from a graze at his shoulder had almost healed completely. Private Durham could barely believe what he saw. Never before he had seen a casualty healing that fast! He got up from his seat, putting the book down. After he watched more closely he mumbled:_

"_Your wounds have healed already_! _I´ll get you a doctor!" He was about to leave and getting a doctor in to show him this almost incredible improvement on a severely hurt soldier._

_Aidan shook his head no. No doctor on it! At all cost there was no doctor to get involved in it! He grabbed for the Private´s wrist, pulling him down again with a denying smile._

"_That´s a miracle!" Private Durham brought out in pure astonishment. He couldn´t believe what he saw here. Private Waite had been brought in the night before! Almost dead after he took that German trench all on his own, alone...!_

"_How did you survive?" he uttered._

"_I killed them before they killed me!" Aidan gave back with a slight smile. He pulled up the blanket over his upper body again, hiding it from everybody´s sight. I should take more care about! These mortals could become a dangerous threat for a weakened vampire like him. The young medic near to him was a strong temptation for his starving body. But he didn´t want to harm him. Anyway he felt pity with him and the man was doing his best to care for him. Private Durham didn´t sound to be the man who was up to fighting. This guy completely lacked of any killer mentality. Being drafted to military service due to general conscription he had chosen to follow in the medical staff, enabling him to help those who were fighting at war. In peacetime he for sure would have made a good nurse or probably a doctor later on, Aidan thought._

"_I could never take a life...How is it to take a life?" His words proved perfectly what Aidan had thought only a moment before. Good and caring guy! No killer at all! Even not a soldier._

"_You seemed to be a good man, Henry! Be glad you don´t know!" Aidan tried to change the theme, really meaning what he was answering to him. There was no compelling at all. But Private Durham was insisting when his next question was put on the table by him;_

"_How many have you killed?"_

_Guess, Henry really wants to know! Aidan thought when he looked at Henry. His view had gotten an expression of curiosity on it. So be it!_

"_I lost count a long time ago..." Aidan gave back as casually as possible, in the hope that the theme would be off the table by now. But the expression in Private Durham´s face told him that the man was about to dig deeper into it. Aidan let pass time by, maybe Henry would..._

_Luck was on his side when the doctor shoved his face through the seams of the tent wall, directing to the compartment next to them where a new wounded soldier was put on the table._

"_Private Durham! Make yourself useful!" the doctor, a Major, demanded. Henry nodded and laid the book to the side, following him over._

_A strong smell of blood swept over Aidan like a full moon´s tidal wave._

_Blood!_

_The doctor looked over the man who was in a mess. Shell splinters had gone in all over his body and he was bleeding like hell._

"_Not that he´s gonna make it...all this blood!" the doctor said when he tried to stop the bleeding. The cloth was soaked through within moments and resigning, he threw it away._

_It dropped to the ground right beside Aidan´s cot._

_Blood! There was blood, even when it meant that he literally had to chew and suck it off the cloth. He grabbed it and his eyes bled black and his fangs dropped in when he lifted it up to his mouth. Greedily he shoved the cloth between his lips and bit down on it, blood mixing with his saliva when his mouth was watering with expectation. He chewed and bit and sucked with all his strength while in the tent compartment next to him the doctor f tried to save the life of the soldier. Aidan didn´t pay any attention to it nor to what was going on around him. He was completely stuck to one thing;_

_Feeding!_

_Only a moment later it turned out to be a mistake when he didn´t care about his surroundings. A French casualty, waiting for the treatment of his wounded head, turned around in an attempt to avoid watching at his comrade who was bleeding to death. A mistake!_

_What he saw was way terrifying; a man on his cot who was sucking on a cloth that dripped from blood! The sight drove a cold shudder down his spine._

_Aidan lifted his face from his...meal...when he suddenly had the definite feeling that someone was watching him. He looked at the soldier who´s eyes grew wide with shock when..._

_Aidan´s eyes were bled black, pools as black as the pitches of hell and sharp fangs protruded from below his upper lip. His mouth was stained with blood._

_The scream froze dead in the soldier´s throat when he stumbled back into the operating room in sheer horror. Turning away from the...monster over there._

_Damn it! He couldn´t go for the French to compel him into forgetting what he had seen. And this guy wasn´t about to die before he could tell anybody. There was only one chance; if nobody would take a casualty´s bosh seriously..._

Upstairs Aidan stopped the girls before they could simply enter the bedroom. Without preparation.

A whiff of...blood hit his nostrils when he was in front of the door. It would... Aidan took a deep breath, tried his best convincing and conspiratorial smile;

"Before you meet him, there´s one little thing I forgot to tell you about Henry...!"

"Ooh...knew there´s something wrong with this!" one of the girls complained and laughed a bit nervously. She made a step backwards, ready to leave probably. Aidan could smell a hint of...fear on her. Not exactly fear but...skepticism. A girl´s natural reaction to a situation she once might have been warned about. Aidan laid an arm around her, his voice became a promise. A spell.

_Otherwise they would flee in panic._

"Henry...Henry is the most awesome man you´ve ever seen..." He smiled and with one hand he opened the bedroom door, directed the girls to go inside.

_To be continued_


	5. Chapter 5 Voyage into darkness - Part 2

_**Chapter 5**_

**Annotation:**_Before I´ve given a warning for chapter 2, but meanwhile it turns out that all this stuff, due to the storyline has a "Rated M" content. More flashbacks are to come, some from Aidan and some from Henry too. I´m generally wondering what these vampires are physically able to cope with, as by my education I know what these injuries would really mean to normal humans! (as a loss of 100% of skin kills a human inevitably. I did some research about this kinda death sentence in medieval times, without going into the details here!)_

_Henry needs blood to heal and Aidan is confronted with keeping things under control when he brings in two young women, rather teenagers, who are about to become meal-on-legs for his beloved son who´s on the edge of dying... Even feeding ungrounded Suren after 80 years of starvation imprisonment had been less risky. Henry has to feed or he will die; a vampire lacking of self-control by morphine and mad with hunger if not by pain..._

_**Voyage into darkness – Part Two**_

A cloud of blood was hanging in the air of the bedroom. To Aidan it was intense like a stench, his nostrils were widening in reflex and he felt his own hunger rising but he fought it down, fought it down when he felt his fangs itching to fall, fought it down when he felt his eyes threatening to turn black.

_In the past he had given in his hunger, his lust for the bodies and his lust for blood when he and Henry had shared one, sometimes two victims at once. Or when he had shared a victim with Suren and it had all gone down the road, regardless to it, carelessly discarding them after they had sated their monstrous appetite..._

The air in the room was warmer than normal because he had cranked up the heater before he had left. He had done this for Henry, following the hospital rules that such kind of severely hurt patients had no such thing like an own temperature regulation anymore. Aidan didn´t know if it would matter anyway, but of another thing he was quite certain; blood would be flowing faster and more easily in warm bodies. Like those of the two girls he was going to…feed to his son. He hoped that he would keep control of the situation…

Henry was miserable.

He looked as worse as when he had left him. Blood clots covered his head, the bare muscles of his skinless body tensed and he could see that Henry´s eyes were shaded by the fog of the morphine he had shot him. Aidan knew all too well how difficult it would be for him to act normally, to give at least the _impression_ of acting normally in the eyes of two beautiful young women.

_Acting normally!What would these women be expecting after what he had told them? Nothing else but having some fun with an awesome guy who was only waiting for them to enjoy a little threesome! A guy who was waiting... A guy who was waiting for them to almost..._

_...suck them dry._

The cushions, the blanket and the sheets were stained with blood now. Obviously Henry had been tossing around in his pain since he had left him. Blood was soaking through this damn gown that he had to dress him in. Hopefully the morphine would be enough to go through this now, Aidan thought full of concern. _I won´t be able to shoot him another dosage in case Henry starts to scream with pain when the girls are around him! Not to speak of...if it would break the compulsion..._

A cold shudder was running down his spine with the thought.

"What...what shall I...with...the...se...?" Henry more pressed out in a hushed voice than he was asking. Aidan shot him a view, far from rebuking him for his useless comment. Aidan was aware that Henry´s mind was shaded by the morphine and pure exhaustion and he only hoped that Henry would make it through this long enough until he would have gotten enough blood for a healing.

_Enough blood for a healing! I don´t even have any clue how much blood will be necessary to heal Henry, to let new skin grow in! Never before seen anything like this on a vampire._

_Henry will better be alive when I´ll come for him! And I hadn´t any imagination what this would mean when I left him with Suren in the room! Damn, I should have taken him away! Away from Suren and the vampires! We should have made it to anywhere being on our own! Henry has survived eighty fríggin years out there on his own and all alone. And now he´s about to die and it´s me who´s responsible for his predicament!_

Henry heard when the door was opened by Aidan.

_The metallic noise when the hings were scratching in their fittings, was shooting a sharp pain through his ears. His pulse was humming in his ears constantly and it was clouding his hearing. The sight in front of him was foggy and his breath was a hollow hissing. His head lolled back and forth like a ball of lead that had lost all connection to his shoulders and the opposite wall was melting and the paint started to run down the bricks like brown streams. Brown like...liquid, old blood and the iron scent was closing in on him, piercing in his nose, crawling up his nose channel and flooding down his throat before it bit deep down into his gullet. His mouth opened by its own and his Adam´s apple jumped when he tried to swallow, setting his throat on blaze. Gurgling sounds were coming out of his throat when his voice cords went for a cream but it broke by his weakness._

_Scents were mixing now. Warm bodies, human and not being his own. A promise of life, food...food...blood! There was blood! He only had to go for it. His head lolled to the side and a wave of another sweet and tempting scent pierced in his brain. What...what was it? When he would close his lids to concentrate they would stick to each other and a red film shaded his sight, hot, sticky, burning. Arousal...sweet arousal from two lives! It would hurt like hell! Can´t...can´t get to it!_

"What...what shall I...with...the...se...?"

Aidan tensed when the taller of the girls, the one with the blond pony tail, stopped and her hands shot upwards to cover her mouth in surprise.

For a second she seemed to be shocked.

"Oh my God...!"

Aidan felt himself stop breathing.

What if the spell wouldn´t work? What if the girl was seeing Henry like he really looked: A bloodied monster? Or at least a victim of a terrible accident like being burnt in a fire. Aidan had seen victims of fire accidents in Boston County ER. Persons not being used to this often went into panic.

A mere second she hesitated then she whispered: "He´s _so_ beautiful!"

Aidan breathed with relief.

Henry sighed and he tried to move at least with a hint of normality. The morphine shaded his view and his movements. He knew that he was at the farthest point from acting normally, barely able to move. The girls were young and pretty ones and they lost no time to undress themselves. Each one of them came to each side of his bed...Aidan´s bed...and climbed up to him.

So far it was not necessary for him to move much. The girls did for him when they cuddled into his arms. Henry hissed with pain but the girl´s minds were shaded by what Aidan had told them and so they took his painful moaning for sounds of pleasure instead.

Without the morphine that Aidan had shot him he would have cried out from pain.

Screams breaking the walls like in the House. Screams that had made Aidan flee from there; unable to stand it when his son got almost tortured to death. There had been a hint of astonishment when he had come back to him and had found him alive. He had been afraid that all he would find was...dust. Ashes. When vampires died they turned to dust. Just being a case for a broom and a dust pan. The cold reality and cynicism of it had driven cold showers down his back. He had been shocked by how disregardful he had been at the thought of it. But fear was a weird psychiatrist.

_Morphine!_

_He had none when he had cut out the bullets from Aidan´s leg and out of his body and limbs. Aidan had been a dying soldier brought into the make shift field hospital. In the eyes of the humans surrounding him. No one knew him to be a vampire._

The girls giggled and with all his concentration Henry lifted one arm of the girl at his left side. She smiled at him and her hand went to his shoulder. He could feel her warm breath when she bent to his ear. It burned hot like fire on his bare temple and it made him almost hiss with pain. He wished she...they would turn away from him. He could drink blood from wrists...

_The face of the young woman was hovering in front of him. His eyes were burning and when he tried to focus, the walls in the distance became a blur. He blinked but it didn´t become any better. He couldn´t remember that he had moved his arm behind the back of the girl to his left but she cuddled to him, he heard her giggling and his hurting fingers slipped when he tried to get hold of her wrist. He suppressed a groan when he pulled her wrist to his mouth._

_He felt his eyes bled black and his fangs extended. His sore tongue tasted the crook of her wrist and he felt her shiver with anticipation. His fangs broke through her skin and a gush of blood filled his mouth, thick, red and hot_.

She moaned but Aidan´s compulsion had shaded her cognition.

Henry had to reign himself in when the first gulps of her blood ran down his sore throat, dried out by the loss of blood and liquids. _Sore with despair and all overwhelming hunger. His veins, his whole body cried with hunger and the wild animal within him raged with fierce power. _

_Never before had he been so bled out, so hungry..._

_Blood. A red cloud filled his mind, his mouth, his whole perception. Blood is life. The world was blood. The world was red and he was in the center of it._

_Hunger._

_Unbearable hunger._

He moaned and the moan became a deep growl.

The girls climbed around him, laughing, moaning with pleasure. Cuddling to his bloodied form like to a lover, not being aware of what was going on really. They took his groans and growls for sounds of pleasure, encouraging them to go on with playing with him.

"Let us go to the end of the rainbow! Do want to go to the rainbow´s end...?" The blonde girl, Beth, cuddled her head on Henry´s shoulder and her hand went down to his groin, her fingers shoved between the seams of the gown.

"Wanna we?!" she encouraged him. "You wanna go to the rainbow, ain´t ya?"

"Beth is really good at it!"

"I´m not only good at it! I´ve a natural talent in hand jobs, Holly!" she protested and kissed Henry´s cheek like to prove how good she was in pleasuring him. Her lips turned red when the blood transferred from his cheek to her mouth. She didn´t even taste it.

Aidan´s compulsion worked pretty well.

_Hot lips touched his cheek and a tidal wave of fire swept over him when salt was burning in his open flesh. He felt his mouth opening and his voice sounded strange in his ears when he groaned, hoarse and low. The walls of the room were blurring and a red film covered his left eye. Groaning...not the screams again...the screams when Suren´s knife had cut deep down under his skin, peeling it off. Screaming until he felt like he was going to suffocate when his heart almost stopped with the unbearable, agonizing pain... seemed to stop completely when before it had been beating so fast, that the single heartbeats seemed to flow into each other until there was nothing else but a constant pounding sound that made his head burst._

Aidan´s fingers clung to the arm-rest of his chair when he saw the girl shove her hand down between Henry´s legs. Her fingers closing around his cock. Aidan gasped and he saw Henry´s face tense with pain when Beth started to rub. He couldn´t intervene, couldn´t jump for her and pull her away from Henry. A deep groan came from Henry´s lips. No pleasure but a sound of pain. That shit must hurt like hell right now, Aidan thought and he felt his heart speed up.

_Iron claws were closing around his cock, squeezing it and a wave of fire was shooting through him, upwards, crawling over his belly and chest until the pain was bursting in his head like a fuel bomb. His head lost the connection to what seemed to be his shoulders when it lolled back with the pain and his face went on fire when his lips opened with a groan that was pounding in his ears. His head lolled forward again and he whimpered in his throat, the throat that was dry like the desert. His fingers exploded in glowing heat when he desperately closed them around a bone structure, pressing and shoving until the burning pain in his belly subsided. A pulse was pounding against his bloody fingertips and the vibration of it made him cringe with hunger. He could literally feel the life under his fingers, the life...the blood. Blood is life. Blood...blood..._

Henry´s head tilted backwards in his neck and his ruined face tensed, his hand lost the grip on Beth´s shoulder when the pain was growing, his fingers clawing through the air. His lids closed and all Aidan could see was an expression of pain in Henry´s whole features, no pleasure... His head lolled forward again, his bloodied face a mask of agony. Finally Henry managed it to grab Beth´s wrist and shove it away from his cock.

"It´s your turn, Holly!" Beth laughed and smiled at her friend, encouraging her to pleasure the man who was crouched between them. Holly laughed and her hand went for Henry´s right shoulder when she bent nearer to him.

Henry seemed to have relaxed a bit at least. Aidan had doubts about the effectiveness of the morphine. The last dose had been one and a half hours ago...the time he had needed to search for two donors... But he couldn´t shoot him another dose...not now! Not with the girls around. Henry closed his fingers around Beth´s wrist and Holly laid her hand over it. The girls giggled and laughed.

_The sounds of the wind were mixing with single explosions from afar when the artillery was firing again at the Germans. It was night and the tent was crowded with casualties. Private Durham was busy with a patient when suddenly the french soldier with the bandage around his head called for him. The medic turned to him, a smile played over his face when he went over to the man who had sit up on his cot._

"_Que puis-je faire pour vous? (What can I do for you?)" he asked the soldier of whom he knew that he only understood French. He bent down to the man who looked at him with an fearful expression on his face. Anything seemed to have him frightened seriously. The man directed over to the other cot on which Private First Class Waite was lying, slumbering under the blankets._

"_C´est un monstre! Un vampire!" (That he´s a monster. A vampire!)the soldier pressed out, his hand was trembling with excitement and he grabbed with his healthy hand for Henry´s shoulder._

"_Ècoutez moi! Voulez vous á mourir tous ensemble?" (Listen to me! Do you all want to die?!)his voice was low but almost tumbling over when he tried to convince Private Durham of his terrible suspect._

_Aidan woke by the turmoil in the compartment beside him and he turned his face, his lids half closed. He pulled the blanket over his shoulder, pretending to be asleep again when really he was listening to the man. He had known that he would have no chance to compel this guy into believing that he had only had a bad dream. No reality. There are no such things as vampires out there. The less in a Casualty Clearing Station amidst war! Aidan sighed and listened in the hope that Henry Durham might be able to calm down the man before this soldier would start a turmoil in the CCS._

_The soldier was insisting and his voice got a hint of panic under it._

"_C´est un monstre! Un vampire!" _

_He clung for the medic´s shoulder, his eyes were widened by fear and Henry could feel him tremble when the man desperately tried to convince him that they would be going to die all together, cause of another casualty in here!_

"_D´accord, d´accord! Calm toi, calm toi!" (Alright, alright! Calm down, calm down!) Private Durham tried to calm down the wounded man, his hands going for his shoulders and his arm. He shot a view over to Aidan who was lying on the cot without any movement. He seemed to sleep but he had doubts that Aidan was sleeping; not when the conversation had gone out of track and he was in the focus of a terrified comrade. _

_He hadn´t seen what had happened to drive the French soldier into panic. Obviously the man had seen anything that had terrified him and it seemed to be connected to the presence of PFC Aidan Waite! Henry´s thoughts went back to the moment when he had discovered that Aidan´s wounds had started to heal with...abnormal...speed. He had seen much in his medic career but the improvement on this specific soldier was beyond all he had seen before. He couldn´t explain it to himself and his expression; that´s a miracle! Was all what he could say about. Anything was strange with PFC Waite! But he couldn´t define it._

_Durham turned his attention to the French soldier again. He looked over the man and his face. It was pale and his skin was sweaty, his eyes were widened and he tried to look over to the other cot but Henry moved into his sight to get him distracted from the comrade. His hands went for the man´s shoulders in an attempt to calm him down._

_In a flash he reminded that he had found a blood soaked cloth beside Aidan´s cot. It only could have come from the surgery compartment next to him, because Henry couldn´t remember to have used it on Aidan or any of the other casualties in this tent..._

_In a case of emergency medics, nurses and the doctors simply dropped everything to the ground without caring for where it went. But he couldn´t imagine how the cloth had been landing so far away from the surgery table. Inwardly Henry shook his head in disbelief, but he turned the thought down when a moment later the doctor came into the compartment, attracted by the excitement in the area. He directly turned to Private Durham._

"_What is he talking about?" he asked because he couldn´t understand the French speaking man. But anything seemed to have horrified this poor guy. A wounded soldier who was about to rise at least a discussion among the other comrades, if not rising any panic in the worst case. When anybody would be mistaking the situation for an German attack to be expected and the officers might be hiding this information from men, who were unable to run on their own legs...panic was the last thing he would have need for just now!_

_The medic looked at the wounded man, then he turned to the doctor, his voice was low and calm when he answered:_

"_Must be shell shock!"_

_The doctor shrugged his shoulders, looked at the French and whispered to Private Durham; "Keep an eye on him! Can´t need him start a panic in here, Private!"_

_Aidan saw that Henry was nodding and he breathed with relief when the doctor turned around and left the compartment again. He shot a view at the man who had obviously resigned when his panic stricken words had no effect. The French sank back on his simple bed and Henry Durham looked at him, then he shot Aidan an indecipherable look before he left the tent too. Aidan sank back on his pillow... _

_...cursing the fact that he hadn´t taken care about this guy, before he had picked up the blood soaked cloth._

_Aidan had no doubts that the good Private had gotten it with whom...or more definitely...with what he had to do it here. Henry was a good and kind man and he wouldn´t rat him out! In the moment this medic seemed to be the only man around he could trust to. He hadn´t called for the doctor when he had seen his all too fast healing wounds, being severe enough as that it could be explained rationally. It would have been better if he could have recovered in secrecy, but this was war! He had been hurt almost to death and they had brought him in here in an attempt to save a soldier´s life, unbeknownst to them that they brought in death-on-legs in form of a vampire!_

_He would have to get out of here as fast as possible!_

_Before things would be running out of hands!_

Aidan sat in a chair beside one wall of the bedroom. His eyes were straightly fixed onto Henry and the girls. Henry managed a smirk but Aidan saw the pain behind it. Henry laughed lowly. He grabbed a girl´s arm, sucking, his eyes fixed on Aidan.

Meanwhile the girls were stained with blood. Some came from the bite marks, the other from Henry´s blood soaked gown. Most of it came from Henry. His movements caused the poorly dried over muscular surface to start bleeding again when the tissue tensed and stretched and tore. Clots were splitting when muscles which were lying beneath, were moving slightly. Aidan strangely thought that it looked, as if Henry was bleeding more intensively than he was getting blood by drinking. His whole body was covered with a dark red, glistening film and the gown stuck to him, soaking wet with the blood. Aidan shuddered when his sensitive vampire hearing caught wet sounds in some certain moments, which had to come from Henry. Not caused by the act of sucking blood but from his movements or from the dripping wet sheets under his tormented body.

I hope this will end soon! Hope the morphine will do it until we´re ready in here!, Aidan thought. After that Henry could go to get the so urgently needed sleep. Could relax and sleep it over after he had cleaned up after him.

Henry looked over to him.

The expression in his face...if anybody could call this a face...was that of pure and unshaded hunger, mixed with barely soothed pain. Henry was on the very edge! These girls were compelled and so they weren´t aware of the real situation, the less they were seeing Henry as he really looked like right now! They took all the sounds he gave off as sounds of pleasure, indicating that all they did was okay with him! More to say; They thought that he wanted more from them, encouraging to go on with pleasuring him, only waiting for the moment when he could enter one of them, then the other girl, riding them to completion.

Henry always had preferred to mix feeding with good and satisfying sex.

Never ever had Henry been at the farthest point from it! Aidan thought with fear, what would happen when one of the girls would simply climb on Henry´s ruined body to take him in her... Aidan almost gagged at the sheer idea and had to swallow hard to get the hot knot down in his throat. He closed his eyes for a mere second and when he opened them again...

...all looked normal.

Their eyes met and he nodded in agreement.

"Eat!", Aidan softly demanded.

"Absolutely...!"

Henry´s head bent down when he went on drinking and Aidan relaxed a little bit. Henry seemed to keep himself under control. Aidan knew how thin the line between self-control and blind ravage was...

Henry was ddrinking and the hunger doesn´t seem to cease. Aidan could see it by the way he was sucking, could hear the slurping sounds and he thought that he almost could hear him swallowing. Anyway Aidan´s view got fixed on Henry´s Adam´s apple that was moving with the gulps. He became aware that watching his son feeding, was rising his own hunger, his own need for blood which he had suppressed as much as possible when he had brought in the two chicks. He had been starving since the night before when his body got burns allover; had been starving since they made their escape from the house that was sold over to Suren´s human lawyer, withdrawing all invitations. Normally he would be in need of blood for himself. He not only _would be_, he was!

But he couldn´t have gone for the girl´s wrists in the streets.

"Now! Which one..."

Henry´s blood soaking fingertip touched the nose tip of the girl to his right. This Holly giggled, obviously taking all of this for some fun. Henry laughed in a low voice and Aidan could hear that it was hoarse with...hunger. And then Henry turned his face to the left. The girl smiled at him, being fully under the compulsion, she expected Henry to turn to her for some more intense fun...

"...goes first?"

He reached out for the neck of the girl at his left side, sending a smirk at Aidan. Ready to take his fill!

_The pumping vein in her neck was vibrating with the pounding of her heart. It was standing out from the surface of her soft and delicate skin. And he could almost feel how his fangs would break through her skin, digging into her hot, living flesh, closing around the wire like string that ran from her heart to her head. The wet, tearing sound of flesh and blood under his fangs and then..._

_her blood!_

_Hot, liquid, sweet like honey...ambrosia for his veins, the sweet nectar that would tilt his agony, sustain him and finally the fading sound of her weakening heart would lull him into sleep until he would wake up to his old self again._

_Her pulse was humming in his ears and he trembled in anticipation for her blood, could almost taste it on his tongue yet! His hunger was driving his senses into overdrive. All what he wanted was her, was her throat, was her blood._

_Blood...blood! Blood was all, was life...was...was..._

Goes first? Goes. First. His heartbeat stopped. _Goes first_...meant Henry to turn to any of them for simply taking a bit more or did he mean by..._goes_...that they were meant to be gone _eternally_? That he thought of going to chug the girls? The girls being meant to be at his personal disposal, no matter if he would kill them to get his fill?!

Aidan grew stiff. His hand shot up and he waved a determined _No_ to Henry, his head shaking no.

"NO! I brought in two and everybody is going to leave happy!", he commanded to Henry when he got up from his seat, moving a couple of steps in direction of the bed.

_There was a sharp and demanding, all compelling voice that pulled the girl away from him, that drove a stake through his heart that was longing for her blood. But he was pulled away with rural force. The voice was insisting in his head and he felt drifting away from release. Why...why...why? He only wanted to feed but he was too weak to resist the voice, to fight it off and go for her neck finally. He was falling...falling into the dark and black pit of hunger but a hand grabbed him and pulled him away. His hands trembled with agony when the slipped. He slipped and fell..._

_The girl...her throat was gone!_

_No throat, no blood..._

"NO!"

Seconds seemed to stretch into eternity... All seemed to move on in slow motion suddenly when..._ He would have to jump for the bed, pulling the girl away from Henry to prevent him from...killing her when he would start to drink from her jugular vein._

_Aidan felt himself stop breathing. He felt his own gaze fixing on the girls throat, on the pulse point where the vein was pumping her hot, sweet blood through her body. His veins burnt in expectation of her blood...ambrosia, life force... Vibrant, alive, alive... Seconds...seconds. The world was shrinking to a cage where only he, Henry and blood were existing, shrinking, locking them in and then..._

Henry´s hand sank down from Beth´s neck and he grabbed Holly´s arm to drink again.

_His mind was clouded by the intense smell of blood. Red. The world turned red and the red cloud was filling him until he threatened to lose his mind. Red heat and he was drifting on a red wave...until he submerged under its surface, bathing in it and feeling the warmth that was flooding his whole body from toes up to his brain. His body was a bottomless pit...a pit that had to be filled...had to be filled with the only thing that would ever be able to sate him. The only thing that would ever be able to satisfy his greedy urge; blood!_

Aidan breathed with release.

No way to end up here with a kill! Drinking from the throat would let the blood be flowing all too fast. Too fast to keep control in a situation like this when an injured vampire was hungry beyond imagination.

The sounds of the feeding and the intensifying smell of blood...blood from the women´s bodies was piercing in Aidan´s nostrils and he growled low under his breath. He felt when his eyes got fixed on Holly´s pulse point at her throat, the thin red line that was running directly below her skin which was stained with blood. The vein, that was pounding in the rhythm of her fastened heartbeat that had sped up with her growing arousal. He so urgently would like to go for her, getting hold of her and biting down hard. In his imagination he already tasted the sweet red honey of her blood on his tongue, felt it running down his throat and...

_Ain´t she sweet? See her walking down that street. Yes, I ask you very confidentially, ain´t she sweet? Ain´t she nice, looked her over once or twice. Ain´t she sweet...?_

Aidan caught himself patting on his knee with his fingers in the rhythm of the old song when his lips silently formed the lyrics from his memory. A dark alleyway in town in 1927...He and Henry had been feeding greedily that time back in the 20s and 30s. No restrictions to put on.

With much effort Aidan retracted his mind´s focus from the girls. He moaned and closed his eyes, taking a deep breath to regain his composure. These girls were meant to be fed to Henry all alone! He would need all blood he could get...

...without killing them!

All went well for a while and there was laughter and the soft, wet sounds of sucking until suddenly one of the girls stared at her companion, her hand reaching out to her.

"You...you are bleeding, Holly!" Her voice went shrill.

"You´re talking freakely nonsense, Beth!", the other girl answered with a laughter. She turned to Henry and stroked his cheek. Her fingers were covered in his blood.

"No! You are bleeding! Look!", Beth cried out and jumped out of the bed in sheer panic. Her hands went all over her body and she stared at the blood on her fingers. She cried again when she saw the blood that was dripping from her wrist and the blood that was covering her forearm, coming from the wound in the crook of her arm. A fine red line was running down from it to her wrist, mixing with the bloody film from the bite marks...

Henry sent a grin to Aidan. He seemed not to be very concerned about. He was so unapologetic about the girls, he seemed not to care about anything at all.

Then the other girl followed the first one and jumped out of the bed, suddenly aware of what was really going on in here. She started crying out in fear and sped around the bed. Her eyes switched from her girlfriend over to Aidan and then back to Henry. Her eyes widened in fear when she became aware of the bloodied monster to which she had cuddled to only moments before!

Henry looked at her and all he did was to laugh.

Aidan heard it but he didn´t have time anymore to care about. Henry was drunk of blood and reacting irrational due to the morphine. Beth was standing beside the bed, her voice tumbling over in panic when she became aware, really aware, what Henry looked like. Her panic stricken voice changed into screams.

"Let US GO! Let us OUT. OF. HERE!"

Aidan´s blood literally froze. _They would ruin it all. The neighbors would call the police when they would hear the screams coming from the house. They would... He had to... _

Aidan was moving now with the first screams of the girl´s panic. He moved fast like a whoosh, grabbed Beth by the head with both hands and turned it around with brutal force.

He heard a distinct sound when he snapped her neck and the delicate bone broke. Aidan let her drop to the ground, speeding for the other girl...

Holly had jumped up from the bed too, staring at Aidan, staring at Beth, watching her drop to the ground like a string puppet whose strings were cut. And she started to scream in panic too, now that the compelling had lost its effect prematurely.

Henry was laughing, he looked around the room, moving slowly to turn his head. His fangs were covered in blood and he seemed to have lost any rational mind.

Before she understood what had happened to her girlfriend, Aidan had snapped her neck too. Her body went limp and fell onto the rug. Aidan´s face was tormented with grief, disgust and guilt. Abruptly he stepped back, almost stumbling over his own feet. He looked at his hands like they didn´t belong to him, looked at the blood that stained his fingers...the girl´s blood and Henry´s blood. Aidan seemed to stop breathing and for a mere second he stared down on the corpse in horror.

God, that wasn´t what he had in mind for the feeding.

_You had never been very good in compelling_!

Damn you, Bishop!

Henry stared at the scenario, his hands were outstretched and his face was torn, a mask of pain when he laughed in a low voice. The amount of blood that he had drunken was not even close to be enough to sate him, the less to satisfy his body´s urges!

_Blood! There was blood! And it was right in front of him! Down and beside the bed. He only had to go for it, had to grab her and the smell of her warm body was overwhelming. Even from the short distance beside the bed, down to his feet. He only had to take her...take her...and feed on her as before..._

_The hunger was a burning desire within his bled out body, a fire that was consuming him with rural force and blood...blood was all, what would soothe it before it would consume him completely. His legs, his body moved by their own. The room turned around him and he groaned and growled when the pain raced through him like fire, but he had to get to the only thing that would let it end!_

_Blood. _

_The air was blood, the room was blood, the girl was blood...hot, red, alive... The room tumbled over when he let himself simply fall off the bed, the pain made him almost scream, a scream that was reverberating in his head. His body was on fire when he looked up, focusing the girl and he crawled forward, the furry mass of the rug was piercing with millions of needles into his raw flesh of his palms, his knees and feet. He groaned and his fangs sank in, the mass of the girl sticking to his hands. Her hot blood rushed down his throat when he finally could feed without restraint... His fangs dug deep into the flesh of her throat and he felt it break under his teeth. There were pieces of flesh in his mouth, on his tongue. He had bitten down so hard that he had torn the delicate material to pieces. He spat it out and sank his fangs into her throat again, drinking greedily. It felt so...so...fulfilling. The sound of the sucking made his veins sing in expectation. The room dissolved into a cloud of blood... _

When Aidan looked over to the bed again, he found it empty. And wet, sucking and dripping sounds came up from the ground beside the bed. They drove a shudder down his back. It was...

Henry had it made out of the bed and he was kneeling beside the corpse, one arm shoved under the body, lifting it to his mouth, sucking at her throat. Then he lifted his head to look at Aidan and a rivulet of blood ran from his mouth and chin. His tongue came out and he licked his lips, smiled at Aidan.

"Five second rule!" Henry brought out with a grin.

The expression in Henry´s eyes was that of a child that asked his parent for kudos for what he had done so perfectly...

Aidan´s face went stone and he turned away. Henry bent his head down again to the body of the girl, biting down hard. Aidan heard when Henry´s teeth broke through the delicate tissue, ripping it to pieces before the tearing sound was exchanged by the wet sounds of a tongue and lips sucking at open flesh. Aidan hadn´t to look to know what was going on beside the bed...

_to be continued _


	6. Chapter 6 Born to Darkness

_**Chapter 6 **_

_**Born to Darkness- Part 1**_

_France 1918_

_The noises and sounds outside the CCS tent had risen to a new level when the front-line had to be steadied against the new attack of the German Army. Henry had get used to the almost never ending noises of war. There were these rare moments when the shooting and the explosions subsided a bit or the weapons were silent for a while. The allied forces had been able to stop the offensive some eight miles from the #54 CCS. There had been a discussion among the officers of high rank, if the makeshift field hospital should be transferred to another location, in a far distance of the one by now..._

_Henry Durham felt tired. He had worked all time through almost twelve hours and it had taken him another half an hour to get a hastily brewed soup. The kitchen unit tried its very best, to get some food finished for the medical staff and the casualties. He had been waiting in a row among other medics and nurses and the soup had been mostly hot water with some spices, to give it any flavor, cut potatoes and a sparse inlay of vegetables. A cheap imitation of this delicious country style soup, he had learned to know in a small French restaurant near London when their transport got a stop, before they were brought over to the Department Nord/Pas de Calais._

_With a slight smile on his tired face, he tried to cling to the aftertaste of the hastily eaten meal. Not really enough to get sated but at least enough to tilt the hunger. Due to the fights and the front-line the supply of food had grown irregular. The kitchen had to take care that everyone in the CCS got some food, splitting it among the people until the next contingent would have come in. _

_He was deep in his thoughts when he returned to the tent with the casualties. He couldn´t get this French guy out of his mind...the man who had so desperately tried to convince him, that they all were in deadly danger because of another wounded comrade._

_Monster...vampire... The poor man had been really upset and when he was suffering from shell shock, he might fantasize about all kind of terrifying things. Lots of good men had gone mad with all the terror of war, watching comrades being torn to pieces by shells, explosions...dying, covered in mud and blood..._

All that blood...he won´t make it until morning...

_The sight of so much blood and terrible wounds were enough, to even drive a sane and strong man mad. Hopefully the transport would pick up the guy soon, as they had no need for someone who was able to drive the whole tent into panic! Last thing we ever get to need, Private Durham thought. The wound to his head might have done more serious damage than expected. A hospital would find out and probably having the option, to give this poor soldier the treatment he would need..._

_Vampires, monsters... feverish dreams of a man in shock!_

_He shook his head no, while he reached the tent. His hand pulled the seam to the side, so that he could enter. The shooting from afar had been on the same level since the early afternoon and there would be more casualties being brought in. PFC Waite was lying on his cot and Henry shot him a look when he passed him, giving him a friendly smile and the man nodded slightly._

_He had looked for his wounds earlier that morning and the improvement in healing was extraordinary. There was no reasonable explanation for it and he had never seen anything like that before. Putting the points together might be leading to strange results, but his mind, the rational part of it, was vividly denying the option that there might be anything out there, what had any relation to monsters..._

_Vampires were products of novelists, belonging to novels of suspense and mystery. And that was all about it! He reminded to have read such a book once, just to give it a trying, but he had found out that it hadn´t been his focus of interest. He looked over to the French soldier and the man only opened one eye at him, obviously being half asleep. Private Durham went over to the next compartment..._

Aidan looked down on Henry in a mix of guilt and strange fascination. Disgust was a feeling, that had left him long ago! Feeding sometimes turned out to go...out of track. All he regretted now, was the death of those two girls. He really had wanted them to leave healthy...and alive...afterward. If they only had not start to scream! Guilt was on his side now. Once again his compelling had failed, as it had failed on officer Garrity. He could almost hear Bishop´s voice in his head, complaining his lack of experience in it...

_The French soldier opened his eyes when the medic had left his area. His arm went under his cot and he produced a makeshift stake...a sharpened piece of wood, made from a broken chair leg. He wouldn´t let this monster kill all his comrades and the nurses, doctors and medics around! Even if no one was about to believe him! He knew what was going on here! He had seen this monster sucking blood from a dripping wet piece of cloth! No man, no human ever, would be sucking, gnawing and chewing blood from a cloth, even when he had suffered from a massive blood loss!_

_He had to finish this! In order to save all these innocent people..._

_He shot a look to the opening in the tent wall. Nobody around to stop him right now!_

_He climbed up from his cot and slipped into the compartment where this monster was lying on another cot, obviously pretending to be asleep. But he won´t..._

_Aidan heard somebody coming and he opened his eyes, just to see himself confronted by this guy, who had seen him sucking blood from that damn piece of cloth. Aidan had no doubts about what this guy was up to, when he saw that piece of wood in his hands. He had hoped that the French had been calmed down by anybody, but deep in his heart Aidan had known that an unwilling witness never was to be denied easily._

_And now his carelessness in feeding was falling back on him with every step of this guy. The expression in the man´s face was that of grim determination, mixed with the stench of his fear and the pounding sound of his rapidly beating heart..._

_He lifted his upper body and before he could jump from the cot, the French had wrapped his arms around his shoulders and chest. Aidan, still weakened from the massive blood loss, growled and tried to shake him off. The man´s arms closed around him like bands of steel, driven by rage and desperation when the guy tried to place the sharp tip of the stake on his chest._

_Aidan and the French soldier struggled wildly, each one trying to get control of the situation. The man tried to pull Aidan down from the cot, in an attempt to get him to the ground and to drive the stake into his heart._

"_Monstre! Vampire! Tu vas mourir! Tu ne vas pas tuer mes camerades! Monstre!" (Monster! Vampire! You´ll die! You will not kill my comrades! You´re a monster!" he barked into Aidan´s ears when he tried to hold grip on Aidan. His fingernails were digging into his skin._

"_Get off from me! Idiot!" Aidan screamed and he threw himself around on his bed, with much effort he managed it to throw the guy halfway off..._

_Henry´s head turned around when screams and turmoil were coming from the next compartment. The compartment where he had left PFC Waite. He could identify his voice, that was rising above a man´s shouting. Anything was..._

_...worse than wrong over there._

_Henry felt, as if he never before had moved so fast in his whole life! He needed no explanation of what was going on there. There was only one option left over and for a moment he regretted it, that he hadn´t paid more significant attention to the obviously feverish stammering of the French. He couldn´t even remember to turn on his heels, but in less than a moment he was in the next compartment. _

_The French soldier had PFC Waite in his grip. They were fighting each one for control over the other and both were growling, gasping and shouting. There was a stake and..._

_This guy was about to stab another casualty!_

_Henry threw himself onto the back of the French, in an attempt to pull him away from Aidan. His arms closed around the French´s chest and his right hand went for the man´s hand that was trying to push the piece of wood into Aidan´s chest._

_This guy had completely gone mad, trying to stake another comrade! Poor guy was totally mad! He had taken his own stammering about vampires seriously, really believing in it and being convinced, that he had to end a monster..._

_With all his strength he managed it to pull him away from Aidan, only to find himself being engaged in a battle for death or life with the French soldier._

"_Laissez-moi! Laissez-moi! Il est un monstre! Un vampire! Il se faut mourir! Mourir! Ou nous allons á mourir trés bientôt! (Let me be! Let me be! He´s a monster! A vampire! He has to die! Or we´ll all be dying soon!) The man screamed into Henry´s ears when he tried to shake him off, turning under Henry´s arms when he managed it to move under him._

_Henry was hit on the chin by an elbow and for a moment he grew muzzy. Only for a moment, but long enough that he lost his tight grip. Long enough for the French to turn around completely._

_When Henry tried to get hold again, he underestimated the force of the turn and he stumbled almost over his own feet by the fast movement. His hands slipped from the man´s arms and he stumbled forward..._

_...right into the French´s momentum._

_Desperately, Henry tried to break his fall. With no success! He was feeling himself falling over, front forward. In a flash, he saw the sharp tip of the wooden stake moving upwards or was he simply falling downward? _

_Seconds seemed to stretch into an eternity and all moved in slow motion. The piece of wood was shooting up to the sky, passing his face, his chest and then..._

_...his body exploded in an all consuming wave of fire, when the sharp stake was driving right into the left side of his belly. Henry wanted to scream, but the pain was so strong, so unbearable that he only brought out a sound of surprise, the scream dying dead in his suddenly all dry throat. His fall didn´t stop strangely and for a moment he looked right into the terrified eyes of the French. This man who never night have intended to kill a medic...a man who had saved his life._

_The ceiling of the tent seemed to tumble over and Henry felt himself whirling around. He groaned and gasped and while he felt himself sinking to his knees, he saw this piece of wood protruding from his belly. His hands went for it in an attempt to pull it out in an reflex, but with no success. His hands were wet and slippery from his blood in less than a second. Henry made it up to his feet again and in sheer disbelief he stared down to his lower abdomen. He groaned through clenched teeth and the pain was agonizing when he felt hot liquid soaking under his shirt, warm and thick and sticky. His fingers were clinging to the piece of wood and his eyesight became a blur, when he felt getting lightheaded. The surroundings were dissolving into fog._

_He pulled at the stake, but then he let go by mere instinct. He would bleed to death! He needed a doctor! Maybe a surgeon might rescue him... Don´t pull that stake out, his mind barked at him. He would inevitably bleed to death when he would pull that stake out, before he was up on the table! His medic mind tried to take over reasonably. Any remaining hint of what he had learned before. But he couldn´t even remember anymore when this had been. The less where it had been. Anywhere...anytime in the past, but that wouldn´t matter anymore soon!_

_Henry stumbled forward, passing the groaning and panic stricken French soldier, who was staring at him in sheer desperation._

"_Je ne l´ai pas prétendu! Mon Dieu! Qu´est-ce que j´ai fait?Je nái pas voulu!," ( I didn´t pretend that! Oh my God! What have I done? I didn´t want that!) he pressed out and Henry heard his desperate voice like from afar. His blood was rushing and humming in his ears, his heart was racing, pounding in his chest and pumping his blood through his weakening body. The blood poured out of his belly in a constant rivulet, dripping on his hands and to the ground. When he bent his head down, he saw that a small pool of dark red liquid was building on the ground, covering the dry straw in an ocean of liquid red..._

_His life was running from him in a stream, river like._

_How much blood could a man lose before he would die? Never thought about to try it on my own! he thought. I can´t kill men. How many have you killed? He had talked to Aidan about it. Strangely enough which thoughts are coming to mind, when you´re dying, he thought. Henry tried to lift his head in an attempt to stumble forward, in an attempt to fix any point beyond the tent wall. He had to make it for the surgical area! Under all conditions! No way out of this!_

_His thoughts were tumbling over and panic was grabbing for his heart that was beating now way too fast. He forced his foot to make a step forward. Left...right...left..._

_He stumbled, blind with pain._

_Aidan stared in shock at the poor medic who was stumbling forward, the wooden stake protruding from his belly, where from a gush of blood was pouring out. The smell of the blood was overwhelming and Aidan managed it to get up to his feet. Merely by conscious will, he moved forward, sinking to his knees in front of a terrified Henry. For a moment Henry felt strong hands on his shoulders, steadying him, then the hands went down to his belly, cupping and catching the stream of blood that was coming from it. Henry stared in disbelief when Aidan bent down his head and started to lick up the blood, that was dripping into his hands._

_From afar Henry heard the French soldier crying and the cries turned into half suppressed screams when the man watched in horror. Aidan lifted his head, his lips glistening from the blood and he looked over to the man. Meanwhile the French´s screams and the turmoil of the fight had attracted the attention of other casualties, who came nearer. _

_Then he got up to his feet again. Henry was wavering by weakness and the pain threatened to send him into unconsciousness. He felt tumbling over, but Aidan´s hands caught him by his shoulders. The noises had risen to a turmoil now and wouldn´t it have been for the hands at his shoulders, Henry would have fallen to the ground._

_One second went by, then another one. Time seemed to have stopped and..._

_...an agonizing pain brought him back to reality, when Aidan pulled out the stake with one fast and determined movement. Henry felt as if being ripped into two pieces and his groan turned into a scream. Aidan´s blood stained face was hovering in front of him and he barely could hear his voice, that was directly in front of his face, only inches away. He would die! Would die...he was dying! Aidan was... _

_...he was... No! Can´t be! Can´t be but... Henry´s mind went into overdrive and all he wanted, was to live! He had to live! He so dearly wanted to see the face of his mother again! Not in heaven, no! He was so young! It wasn´t about him to die yet! Not now! Aidan was..._

_Vampire! Vampire! The word was pounding in his head with rural force, pulling at the strings of his basic instincts which were focusing now on only one target: Life!_

_Henry couldn´t barely hear his own voice, that was weak beyond imagination. He was whispering or maybe he was screaming for it! It made no difference now and he was far away from being able to differ anything! It didn´t matter anymore. His only chance for survival...irrespective at which cost, and even when he would send his soul straight forward to hell...he would ignore it..._

_...survival was right ahead._

_His lips moved and Henry heard himself groaning and pressing out these words right into Aidan´s face. He didn´t even know, if Aidan could hear him, would hear his desperate plea:_

"_Do...don´t...let. Me. Die!"_

_He was drifting, his body lost contact to the head, the straw covered ground jumped right into his face, but he was still...standing? Drifting? Falling? Hands were on his shoulders, steadying him. Aidan´s face was pale, stained with blood, but to him it was like the bright face of an angel._

"_You don´t wanna die, Henry?! I won´t let you die!"_

_Aidan´s voice was thundering in his head, that grew more and more lightheaded and when Aidan let his shoulders go, Henry fell down to the ground._

"_C´est un monstre! Un vampire!" The soldier had sprang back to life, awakening from his fear stricken paralysis. He directed at Aidan and some men moved in with grim determination to back him. Out of the corner of his eye, Aidan saw a handgun that was lifted, aiming for a target..._

_There was a noise like the crackling of a nut shell. Henry couldn´t explain it, but he didn´t need to because in the next moment all hell was breaking loose. Aidan let him lying with complete disregard, where he had fallen down. Aidan literally jumped into action, when he attacked the first man in sight, snapping his neck. The noise was unnaturally loud in his ears, when he heard the delicate bone breaking. A corpse was landing on the ground, right beside him._

_The tent was filling with screams, growling, shouting and hissing. Men screamed like pigs in a slaughterhouse when Aidan ripped throats open, separating flesh and veins from bones. Barely that one was killed, Aidan´s hands went for the next opponent. Very fast opponents were turning into victims, when the pile of corpses was rising. Henry heard screams and groans all around him, when Aidan went on a bloody rampage. _

_He growled, his teeth had become a set of fangs, that were dripping wet from blood. He was moving with inhuman speed._

_Nurses, medics and soldiers were running around, adding to the chaos of death and bloodshed. A cot tumbled over when a wounded soldier was pulled away from it and in the next moment, the primitive bed landed on his back when the man ended, chest down, on the ground, his horror stricken face directing to the ceiling. The turmoil was rising to a crescendo when the fighting and killing reached its horrifying maximum, turning the former peaceful and safe tent into hell._

_Henry unwillingly got a definite imagination, how Aidan had managed it to take a whole trench all on his own. He was..._

_a monster!_

_And he, Henry Durham, had given in to him, had tried to protect him from the comrades, had begged him for his life in a plea of despair! He had signed up for his own damnation!_

_The ground was covering with corpses in a terrifying speed and Henry stared into the frozen and widened in horror, yet dead eyes...of a man who had landed on the ground, right in front of his face. Henry tried to scream, but his voice gave in by the loss of blood. His mind screamed No! NO! NO!_

_The pounding and hellishly burning pain in his belly was spreading over his whole torso, fixing itself in his throat with a wave of nausea, that made him choke. His left hand was stuck under his body when he had dropped to the ground and his right hand was pressing on the wound, the blood was dripping out between his fingers, which were wet from it meanwhile. Henry felt unable to move an inch. He tried to lift his face in an attempt to search for Aidan, but with no success and then he clenched his teeth with a groan when his belly exploded._

_A wave of darkness swept over him. Locking out the screams and the shouting and all the terrible groaning of dying people around him. Locking out the metallic taste of his own blood, that was oozing out from his mouth..._

The wet sucking sounds went on when Henry drank again. Aidan staggered out of the bedroom to regain control of himself. The strong and overwhelming smell of fresh blood that had flood the room almost broke his own controls, he was holding on so dearly. It had made his own urge for blood rising and it had needed him much control to withstand and not accompany with Henry.

Aidan went downstairs, feeling like numb and deaf and he let himself fall onto the couch.

_Henry had gone out of control and it is my mistake! I´m responsible for what had happened up there. I should have known this! I must have known this! I didn´t want to kill these girls...should have let it to Henry to compel them into mental and visual dullness! He´s so much better in it! Oh my gosh! Henry...can´t blame him for! _

Images came up again. Henry sitting in the bed, laughing, giggling, obviously gone mad with hunger.

_It´s the morphine! It´s the pain! He doesn´t know what he´s doing! Never tried it on one of them! It´s the stuff, stoned him up to the cortex..._

Hehad no experience with morphine on vampires, but obviously it worked as in humans. A dosage which was high enough to tilt Henry´s agony so far, that he would be able to move without screaming from pain and without sending him straight back into unconsciousness again... Aidan knew with some certainty, that it would create a level of euphoria, shading the receptiveness, disabling him to differ between reality and imagination. Henry´s reaction was due to his condition and the high dosage of morphine.

No way out.

Aidan sighed deeply.

Sally materialized in the living-room, in the door to the kitchen. She flickered for a moment, not being certain, if this would be a good moment to show up right now. The last time she had seen Aidan tonight, he had been in a hurry and in some barely hidden stress. She was living long enough with these guys under the same roof...

_Living!_ She wasn´t _living_ as she wasn´t _alive_ anymore! More correctly Aidan and Josh were sharing the same house with her as it was her own, now, that Danny had died in jail! But ghosts couldn´t become owners, at least not of stuff of the material world...

Sally was existing, drifting between worlds; reality and the otherworld.

_Both_ were realities. Real life was as real as the otherworld, but modern people denied the existence of it. Vampires and werewolves were real, although humans denied their existence as well. Self-protection, she thought with a smile, as there were no predators out there anymore who might be able to hunt down humans. T-Rex and Velociraptor never had existed in the same era with human beings. Sabertooth and cave bear had been tilted from the surface of earth long ago.

Mankind was safe...

Obviously. You´re so pretty wrong, man! Sally grinned and the grin spread over her beautiful, yet ethereal, face until it reached her dark eyes with the soft lashes.

...long enough that she had seen, that Aidan was in tremendous stress cuz of his son, even when he tried to hide it from her. Or he hadn´t been aware of it himself in the moment. She moved nearer, flickered almost into non-existence, then she rematerialized again beside the couch.

Aidan didn´t even twitch. Either he was used to her way of appearance out of nothing or he was deep in his thoughts.

When Sally looked at him, the second option seemed to be the true one. Aidan´s cheek was stained with drops of blood and his hand moved upwards when his fingers wiped at it with no effort.

"He, what´s up, Aidan? Looks like you´re..." she began, but he made her shut up with a gesture and she stopped, shot him an inscrutable glare, shook her head and sat down in the opposite chair. She saw Aidan staring at his hands, then he buried his face in his hands and his shoulders shivered when he sobbed without so much as a sound.

From his momentarily shown mental state, Sally decided, that it might be better not to disturb him because she didn´t know about the reasons of his grief. Had the meatsicle up there...sorry, _his son_!...died up there in her bedroom?

When a vampire died, there wasn´t almost enough left over to fill a dust pan up to its edges...she thought. She wondered if it would hurt to turn to dust.

Since she was a ghost, she sometimes thought about death and the process of dying on a more impersonal level of judgment. Aidan had complained about the fact that she sometimes crossed boarders; with either the innocence of a child or with the cold-heartedness of someone who had nothing to lose anymore.

It took Aidan hours, so it looked to him, until he felt able to return upstairs for cleaning up. The room was silent except for the sound of shallow breathing that came from anywhere. Aidan went through the bedroom, the air strong with the smell of blood that was drying over now. The smell of pure iron slowly changed to that of drying blood with its typical smell of rust.

He searched for Henry and finally found him crouched down beside the bed. The rug was soaked with remaining blood from the feeding and he would have to get rid of it. Josh would really be all excited!

Josh kept everything in the house clean, due to his Jewish background and more; due to his OCD and he hated it when anybody left a mess behind himself...

_to be continued _


	7. Chapter 7 Born to Darkness - Part 2

_**Chapter 7**_

_**Born to darkness- Part 2 **_

_**quote:**_ source by the graphic novel___"Dracula"__**: I see my soul, spreading out its wings into darkness, rising out of the nightmare like herons from a march... **_

Better to let disappear the remains of the so went-out-of-control-feeding without Josh getting it. For sure Josh wasn´t an innocent when it came to feeding, but he tried to get himself far far away when it was Full Moon. When ever possible he fled into the forests as deep as possible to prevent himself from killing an innocent in his werewolf state.

Deer, other wolves, smaller animals fell prey to his outrageous state. But as far as Aidan knew no human beings. Josh often woke up after that beside a hunted down and halfway fed up animal. Or he locked himself up into a far distant chamber in the cellar of Boston Suffolk County, where Aidan regularly had to free him from afterward.

Aidan looked down on the crumbled figure of Henry. He looked so miserable and his eyes were closed, his limbs outstretched in nearly impossible angles when he had sunken down beside the drained body of the girl. He thanked his stars that he wasn´t lying half under or over the dead girl.

Aidan´s mind revolted to think of her as a plain corpse. Seeing the girl, he felt guilty for her. He didn´t have that in mind for both of them. He had brought them in, determined to keep everything under control: the situation, Henry and the feeding, and to have them leaving afterward relatively unharmed except for some fast healing, discrete bite marks.

Cleaned up bites, what meant bite marks being licked clean, were usually healing fast with no scars left, due to the coagulants in vampire saliva.

No murder, no snapping necks to be on the plan!

He could not blame Henry for it.

Henry didn´t kill the girls. It was him who did so when the compelling went off and the girls started to panic. They had been no willing donors like in the Halloway Hotel, where he or Henry had fed in the past. Willing donors who offered themselves out of free will, with no mind to be shaded, nor manipulated, offering themselves to be fed from by the vampires and often enough grated with the favor of an extraordinary sexual experience.

Henry preferred to have and enjoy sex while feeding. Over the years he had brought it to a kind of perfection having his fill, feeding while having sex without losing so much of control that he would seriously harm his partners during the act. And Aidan couldn´t remind any complaints by Henry´s partners.

Aidan himself rarely took the same road because he didn´t feel so sure in not losing control while mixing up feeding with sex. He once meant to have killed a human girlfriend when doing so. Afterward he had called for a clean up, meant her to be killed by him accidentally. It turned out that Bishop instead had turned her vampire without Aidan knowing it.

Aidan grabbed for the girls, pulling them aside and placing them in a halfway dignified manner, covering their limb bodies with a sheet from the closet. Here was no mistaking. They were definitely dead and he would have to call for a clean up. Looking down on them, made his throat dry and he felt a knot rising.

He had fought so dearly for being human.

Not being the monster everybody marked him with.

This time he had lost the fight.

When he had momentarily finished with the girls, he went for Henry.

Henry was still crouched down beside the bed, on the rug and Aidan bent down to him, studied his...it was really hard to call it a...face, searching for a sign of reaction behind the closed lids. The lids which Suren had left to him.

_The tent was almost silent but for the low moaning of a wounded soldier, whose body was still lying on the slim field bed. Aidan turned his face to him and watched over the man who had been brought in two days ago. He had been severely hurt and the doctor hadn´t given him much of a chance for survival. Because of his condition he hadn´t been participating in the deadly fighting in the tent and Aidan hadn´t cared about him until now, that nobody else was still alive in the # 54 Clearing Station. The man´s breath was fast and weakly and he wouldn´t make it until morning or probably only a bit longer. Though he wasn´t a medic, he could tell that this guy was about to die soon._

_Medic!_

_Where was Henry?_

_Aidan turned around and walked through the tent. Bodies were lying everywhere on the ground or on tumbled over field furniture. A young nurse was lying across a cot, her head was hanging down like that of a string puppet whose wires were cut. Blood was dripping from her mutilated throat and she was plain dead as he couldn´t hear her heart anymore. The air was thick and heavy with the smell of blood, so intense, that his veins cringed with hunger. His lips were red with blood and he had fed hastily on a couple of throats while he had rampaged the tent._

_Aidan almost stumbled over a body, that slipped from a cot and dropped right into his path when death made the body give in under his own weight. He felt numb all over as if under some drug, but it was this feeling one got when there had been tremendous stress that suddenly had come to a hold. He had been fighting and running and jumping through the compartments, killing men, medics and nurses in a row. So fast that every single kill had been merely a whoosh. Now, that he felt his breath calming down and the blood was running through his system more steadily, he became aware of what had happened. His body was coming down from the height of action and killing and it felt like coming down from an intoxication from an all too sweet drug._

_Blood was his drug and Aidan felt halfway drunken from it. When he was feeding without a stop, the effect was equal to that of a human, who was drunken by too much alcohol..._

_But he had to focus on another thing now!_

_He had let Henry lying in any of these multiple compartments and to tell the truth; he couldn´t remind in which one it had been. Also another effect of the wild fight he had gone through. All the screams and the smell of blood and the fighting had been intoxicating, the moments he has had let go completely, giving in to the wild and unveiled side of his true nature._

_For a moment he bent down, putting his hands on his knees and he took a couple of deep breaths, just to reset himself. He had to find the medic and he had to find him fast! The last thing he had done, was to pull out the stake and then Henry had sunken down to the ground. Aidan had literally jumped over him, being completely vamped-out...and had gone for the first man in front of him._

_Aidan lifted his head, his hands still on his knees and listened for heartbeats. His vampire senses caught two different ones; the wounded soldier and over there, in the next compartment, the heartbeats from...Henry._

_They were fast and weak and Aidan sped into the next room. There wasn´t much time left when he wanted to save the young medic´s life. He knew that this didn´t mean...mortal...life! As Henry was wounded to death. Without any surgeon at hand...and he had killed the last one only a moment ago...Henry would die, bleeding to death through the deep hole in his belly. The blood had been gushing from the severe wound and he regretted it, that he hasn´t had the time to care for him at least, as he had to fight off these men who had been starting the attack against him._

_Hastily he looked around the room and then he found Henry lying on the ground beside another man. His arm was stuck under his body that was lying halfway twisted in the same position, in which he had fallen to the ground, when his body gave in under the blood loss._

_Aidan crouched down beside him, his hands went hectically over the limb body of the young medic. He turned him over onto his back, his right hand went for the pulse point at Henry´s throat. For a moment he couldn´t feel anything, but then Aidan breathed with relief, when after a felt eternity there was a weak pulse. It was dangerously weak, but there was still a pulse! _

_There would be no more time to be lost! The dark glistening pool of red liquid, that had built up under his belly, indicated that Henry had at least lost one and a half liter! More than normally a healthy man could cope with, without getting in danger for life._

_Henry lowly groaned and Aidan pulled him up into his lap. His lids fluttered and even in the dim light he could see that his pupils were widened. His skin was cold with sweat. All indications of a massive volume loss._

"_Henry!? Henry...do you hear me? Listen to me! Henry!" Aidan urged him and stared into the all too pale scleras of the young man. He had seen the signs of massive blood loss all too often; on people who were willing donors as well as unwilling victims, who were brutally used with disregard. Hectically he felt for the pulse again and gave a deep breath of relief, when the heartbeat fluttered against his fingertips._

_Henry groaned with obvious pain when he felt being pulled up from the ground. His head lolled from one side to the other and the back of his skull ended on what felt like muscles of steel. There was something soft between his head and what had to be a shoulder. Bandage, a thick bandage. Aidan had...he had a bandage over his chest and shoulder. It had to be Aidan...but Henry felt so incredibly weak that he gave up with trying to find out. _

_Dark brown eyes were hovering in front of his face, a face that was pale and had red blotches all over, most of them around the lips and on the chin. Henry groaned again and his eyes were fixing on these red blotches which perfectly matched the red of the lips. A hand moved up and the back of it wiped over the mouth area. With strange fascination Henry looked up from his position, the remains of his blood were humming in his ears and when he tried to look over to the wall of the tent, a wave of black darkness swept into his sight from the corners of his eyes. The tent wall tumbled over, before it dissolved into fog, followed by a nausea rising fit of dizziness. He tried to lift his hand, fumbling for a hold and anyway he managed it to grab an upper arm. He squeezed hard but weakness took its toll and his hand slipped down on the skin, finally ending beside Aidan´s leg._

_A face bent over him and these lips were moving._

"_You´ll have to cling to life with all your strength! You´ll have to focus on your life and nothing else but your life, Henry! Your very life is all what counts now! I won´t let you die, Henry! You don´t wanna die! I won´t let you die! You´ll live forever, Henry!...Henry...?" This voice was vibrating in his head, stronger and louder than the sounds from the surroundings, even overwhelming the humming of his blood in his ears. His head seemed to hover and he doubted that it was still fixed to his shoulders by the neck._

_He wondered that there was still blood...any blood...dripping from his belly. With a strange fascination he bent his head and managed it to look down. There was warm wetness under his butt and he put his hand on his belly and when he lifted his hand again, it was glistening red from blood._

_His blood._

_For a mere second there was silence. His belly was an agonizing mass of pain. Life was running from him in a stream...river like. The pain was pounding through his torso, up to his throat and down to the tips of his toes. All he could feel was pain! Agonizing pain that was consuming him with a hot flame that burned his inside out._

_When he could feel pain, he still had to be alive... A dead man won´t feel pain._

_That voice was vibrating in his mind, in his head, that grew more and more numb with every drop of blood that was running from him._

_He would die..._

_Don´t let me die! Don´t let me die!_

_His fingers had been digging into Aidan´s shoulders when the stake had been pulled from his belly. He had looked into those black pools of eyes, he had seen the fangs snapping into position, a mere second before Aidan had let him drop to the ground and had gone for his first opponent._

_Don´t let me die!_

_Was this his own voice, that was whispering or screaming at the man, who was holding him in his lap like a little kid? Or was he hallucinating now by the blood loss? Was it Aidan´s voice in his mind or his own voice?He couldn´t differ anymore and it didn´t matter anymore._

_Don´t let me die! Don´t let me die, don´t let me die... I´ll burn in hell for it, but don´t let me die! Don´t...!_

_Henry felt, that a hand was supporting his head, steadying it and a thumb was gliding from the side of his throat to his chin. His head was lolling in a strong hand and finally the thumb comforted his lower cheekbone, carefully turning his head to the left side. He felt so unbearable weak that he wouldn´t have had the strength to get his head and chin out of the grip, which fixed his head to the side._

"_Cling to your life, Henry! With all your remaining will and your remaining strength!" he heard Aidan´s voice in a demanding tone. The thumb comforted his chin and Henry felt the touch as if it was some tenderness from a lover. He wasn´t in men...usually. The same he lacked of options to tend to women over the last months..._

_Why so ever did he care about his tendencies right now, when his heart and his mind were fighting for the withering life, that was running from him? But he had never before been so near to death and maybe this was, what dying was meant. The things people were speaking of when it came to dying...at least when there was any time left to think about anything in general. If not dying meant to be ripped to pieces by shells and artillery fire..._

_He ever had imagined to grow old and to die by age, or to be killed when the enemy would overrun the CCS by any chance, disrespecting all rules of war._

_The almost caressing touch turned into an iron grip, when Aidan´s hand forced his head to the side, fixing it..._

_A storm of hot breath stroked over his bared throat and fingers fumbled to pull the collar of his uniform shirt to the side. Henry groaned deeply, more by weakness as by pain now because his body had almost been bled out. He was growing more and more numb and all he could feel, was this hot and sweet breath at his throat. By any reason he could smell the strong scent of iron that was coming from the lips and the face beside his own._

_Blood._

_Aidan smelled of blood. Not his own and not Aidan´s obviously. Could a man on the threshold of death smell these fine differences in human blood...? While dying, his senses were either going into overdrive or his senses were playing tricks on him._

_Aidan breathed into his throat and he heard a distinct sniffing as if the man/Aidan/the vampire took in a hint of his, Henry´s scent, before..._

_Henry felt his heart almost stopping and he waited. Time seemed to stretch into an eternity and then he was feeling it,when hard and sharp tips of fangs were almost caressing the sensitive skin. Henry tensed and waited..._

_The pain was sharp, short and almost robbed him of the weak rest of consciousness when the sharp tips were breaking through his skin. What had to be Aidan´s lips, was feeling like liquid fire that was burning deep into his flesh, closing in like the mouth of a greedy predator. A tongue pushed hard against his skin and the searing wound felt like a crater between his head and his shoulders._

_The knife scratched over his back and then it cut down. The sharp blade broke through his skin and for a part of a second it felt...cold. Just a moment before searing heat was shooting through his whole body, crawling down his back and spreading over his sides and his whole torso, setting his whole body on blaze. The sharp pain was rising to an agonizing level and Suren was smiling..._

_All he could do, was to scream..._

_His body twitched and tensed and his heels were pounding on the sticky and blood-soaked plastic foil. His fingers grabbed for any hold, but all he could get to were the edges of the table under him. His fingers were grabbing around the edges with the force of steel claws..._

_...All he could do was to scream and his screams of agony were breaking even through the massive walls..._

_His body twitched and tensed and his heels were pounding on the sticky and blood-soaked straw on the moist ground. His fingers grabbed for any hold, but all he could get to was the clay beneath. His fingers were digging into the ground with the force of a plow..._

"_Hold on! Hold on, Henry! You´ll live...live forever! I don´t let you die! You´ll live! Forever!" Aidan growled against his throat while his tongue licked at the wound like a thirsty animal at a pool. Henry was feeling it when he grew more and more weak, the more Aidan was sucking at his throat._

_He would die..._

_Then the lips retracted from his searing throat._

_Henry moaned weakly and his body went almost limb by the loss of blood. He had lost so much blood cuz of the stake wound and now Aidan had taken the remaining one too! Vampire! The vampire was killing him! What else, now that he had killed all those people in the tents? Where was any difference now? He was only one more victim in the row of these kills, nothing else!_

_He had to expect nothing from this...monster. The poor French guy had been right with it, but he had been too disregarding to really listen to him! Now he would have to pay the prize, now, that he was about to die inevitably..._

_He was even too weak to push himself off from the body, that was holding him._

_He heard a soft crackling noise, shaded by the wet sound when something pierced a surface, diving into something soft and moist. Henry couldn´t differ where from it came, what caused the strangely attracting sound._

_A strong wrist was suddenly pressing onto his lips, when Aidan had pulled his body a bit upwards into his arms. There was a strong, metallic taste on his lips that came with the sticky moisture, when the hot flesh was pressed against his mouth. Henry moaned under it when he tried to turn his mouth away from the dripping wound._

_With his last consciousness he got it that the metallic taste belonged to..._

_...blood! _

_Oh my Goodness! He won´t! He won´t drink...blood. A man´s blood! Blood of a...vampire! A wave of disgust rolled up in him and with all remaining strength, he tried to grab the wrist and push it away from his mouth. But he was way too weak by now. When his revolting mind imagined his hands clinging around Aidan´s wrist, getting hold on it and pulling it off his face...his body disobeyed and his hands remained motionless on the ground._

"_No, Henry! No! Don´t try that! You have to feed for staying alive! Henry! Feed...!" _

_Aidan was holding him, his hand was at Henry´s chin, fixing it again and his wrist was on Henry´s lips and after an eternity, his lips moved and his mouth opened. _

"_Drink! Drink, Henry! You have to feed! You have to stay alive, Henry! You remember; you don´t wanna die! You wanna me not letting you die! Now I don´t let you die, Henry!"_

_You don´t wanna die...don´t die! _

_He didn´t want to die. He had begged for his life, had begged Aidan to save his life! And deep in his heart and his mind Henry knew what it meant. He had begged a...vampire...to save his life. He had only vague imaginations how that would happen, as he had never given much into superstition and the legends, people were talking about. Only once he had read a book with a vampire novel, finding out that these kinda stuff has not been the one to rise his deeper interest into the matter. He had almost no clue about the procedure of someone becoming a vampire, an immortal being. Anyway there had been a hint, that it might have to do with being on the edge of death and the vampire sucking almost all of the blood from his victim. Being bitten and being drained to the edge of death. But he had lost so much blood that there wasn´t much left to be drained by Aidan. He was in the state of near-death, not much to be done now by Aidan to tip him over the edge..._

_The thought of ingesting blood, human blood or immortal blood or whatever it was, that would be coming from a vampire...was terrifying, disgusting, revolting. His conscious mind was screaming NO! His mind of reason denied any kinda this thought. But there was no reason left over when it came to dying or the simple, instinctive and basic question of survival!_

_He would die. Now!_

_Or he would live..._

_Aidan felt a tongue at his wrist and Henry´s lips were closing around it with sheer desperation. His tongue moved over the wound and finally he started to lick at it. The licking turned into a desperate sucking and gnawing and Aidan´s face tensed when it started to hurt, but Henry was clinging to his wrist now like a drowning man to a straw..._

_It wasn´t disgusting at all, didn´t taste repulsive as he had imagined. On the contrary it tasted sweet, thick and with a hint of honey under it. Either a vampire´s blood was of a different consistence and quality than that of a human or he simply had never longed so strongly for it. Being on the edge of death changed everything, even established points of view onto certain things..._

_Hot, red liquid was filling his mouth like the sweetest ambrosia, like nectar or the god´s essence of life force. He licked urgently and when he couldn´t get enough this way, he bit down hard into Aidan´s wrist, his teeth too blunt to cause much of a damage cuz they were human in shape and strength, not being a vampire´s fangs. Aidan answered it with a groan of pain, but he didn´t retract his wrist from his lips. With all his remaining strength Henry began to suck urgently on the blood, falling into a rhythm of sucking and gnawing alternately. When the oozing of the blood threatened to subside, he pressed his teeth into the flesh, putting pressure on the wrist to force out more of the blood._

_Strangely enough it felt hotter than usual, in his mouth and when it was running down his throat, into his belly. Maybe only his body had been growing colder by the loss of his own blood. Warmth was spreading through his veins and down all over his entire body. He was feeling some dizziness that was taking possession of his body until it was reaching his head. The tent walls beside him started to dissolve into a green-brown mass of somewhat liquid consistence, melting in the corners of his eyes and he moaned with surprise, when it felt like his whole body was on fire, heating up from inside. The same time Aidan seemed to drop away under him and he felt like he was floating above the ground._

_The cold wetness of the straw covered clay ground had been gone and all he could feel was Aidan´s body that was connected in a strange way to his own. There was a connection of a quality that one could only call...minds melting into each other. Never before he had been feeling anything like this, even not in the thralls of sexual passion._

_Henry´s sucking and licking went on and Aidan felt himself growing weaker by the feeding. But he had to go on now, once he had started this!_

"_Yes, Henry...do it! Eat! Drink my blood and you´ll live! You´ll live forever, Henry!" Aidan encouraged him. _

_Henry had to take his immortal blood when he wanted to survive! No way out! Aidan was weakened by the fight and his own injuries and Henry would need more blood than in a normal turning, because he had lost so much blood before by the damn staking. That goddamn piece of wood had missed the main artery in his belly only by luck. Otherwise Henry would have died within a few minutes! Aidan sighed and pulled his own wrist away from Henry´s lips. He had to feed himself to give him what he needed. Aidan looked to the side. There was another guy lying nearby, barely alive, but still alive..._

_Aidan was holding Henry with one arm and Henry didn´t react much to him, but his eyes widened, when Aidan´s hand pulled at the body beside them. Henry saw that the soldier was pulled nearer and Aidan bent down to the man, his fangs bared, and he bit down hard, opening the man´s throat. In silent horror Henry stared at him when he began to suck at the wound, doing this for half an eternity, before Aidan obviously had fed enough on the man and roughly pushed the body aside like a useless tool. After this he bent back to Henry again and pressed his wrist against Henry´s lips again._

"_Eat, Henry! Eat!"_

_Henry pressed his lips on the wound again that Aidan had made for him. He sucked and groaned under it, slowly losing the connection to his own body, that was tingling all over. Henry gasped and moaned and his eyesight grew blurry. His eyes closed and then he would have almost slipped from Aidan, if the vampire wouldn´t have been holding him in a tight embrace._

_Suddenly the convulsions started, when his body reacted to the first moments of the turning process, that was nonreversible now. Inevitably leading into Henry turning vampire. Aidan let Henry glide to the ground, keeping his head in his lap, steadying him carefully without fixing him under the seizures. Henry breathed with much effort and all that was coming from his lips now, were desperate gasps for air. His eyes opened and his cerulean eyes became darker, but not the black pools of a vampire. He buckled and then his limbs relaxed when he lost consciousness..._

_Aidan was sitting on the ground, Henry´s head was lying in his lap and the weight of it was pressing on Aidan´s most sensitive area. He sighed and tried not to fix on the thoughts which threatened to drift into a direction, that was not uncomfortable to the slightest, but anyway wrong in the situation now. Aidan knew that it would take some time until Henry´s body would have passed the first steps of turning. _

_Henry would glide from a merciful unconsciousness into deep sleep, while his body was transforming from human state into the immortal state of being a vampire. Physically his body was running through tremendous stress by the process and it was on shut down mode to protect the most sensitive parts like the brain from severe damage. At the same time the belly wound would slowly start to heal, when the vampire blood would take over and recuperate his seriously damaged torso. _

_Henry´s breath was more steady now, when his system was filled up to some certain degree, from which Aidan was not sure, if it would be really enough. But his breathing came in shallow, fast gasps, indicating that his body went through tremendous stress. His limbs were lying outstretched onto the ground and Aidan bent down to him. He decided to crouch down beside him and he pulled Henry up into his lap and his arms, cuddling the weakened body against his own body._

_It would take until the morning or probably until noon, before Henry would wake up from the turning sleep. And then he would have to feed again, to sustain his newly...awakened...vampire body. He would have to learn how to feed without leaving a trail of corpses behind. Bishop hadn´t taught him much like that. They had been feeding greedily, giving in their urges without regard and without remorse in the trail of the Revolutionary War. But times had changed by now._

_Henry would have to learn how to feed and how to overcome his reluctance when it came to a killing. No more...I can´t kill men..._

_Aidan smiled silently when he pulled a blanket over them._

_To be continued_


End file.
